Welcome to The Scotsman Sessions

With performing arts activity curtailed for the foreseeable future, we are commissioning a series of short video performances from artists all around the country and releasing them on scotsman. com, with introductions by our critics.

Highlights so far include:

KT Tunstall performing her new song, Anything At All, from her home in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles

Scotland’s Makar Jackie Kay reading two lockdown poems, Still and Mask

Tam Dean Burn tackling the subject of Scotland’s salmon farming industry in an excerpt from his show Aquaculture Flagshipwreck

Scottish Chamber Orchestra cellist Su-a Lee playing Dvořák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me in a forest near Grantown-on-spey

To watch, visit www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture

The novel is populated with characters from different generations and backgrounds, but there is no let-up in the duff imagery and loose phrases: Olivia staring from a train window at “stammering suburbs”; a woman’s “emphatically late period”; her partner feeling “apprehensively excited” about the pregnancy but “stoically resigned” to its potential termination; Olivia running her fingers “nostalgically” through Francis’s hair; the “crushing literalism” of a hilltop ranch named Hilltop Ranch, then five pages later a “crushingly inadequate” $500,000 salary.

The ending is poignant in its plainness, a glimpse of what might have been had St Aubyn called off the adverbs sooner. It makes you wonder if there was an interesting story in here, desperate to escape from under the unpliant branches of its author’s imprecision.