With a new play celebrating Scotland’s first Gay Bookshop, Lavedner Menace, due to open at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, co-owner Bob Orr looks back to the start of the story, in 1982. Your involvement in selling books started long before you opened Lavender Menace. I’d come to Edinburgh in 1976. By 1979 I was part of […]
About paulfcockburn
Edinburgh-based freelance magazine journalist, specialising in equality issues (disability and/or LGBT+), popular science, and arts & culture.Author Archive | paulfcockburn
Putting Family History on the Map
Historic maps can help you better understand the lives of your ancestors, and can even clear up some mysteries, explains Paul F Cockburn. Some 14,000 years ago, in what is now Abauntz in the Navarra region of northern Spain, an unknown man or woman picked up a stone tablet and began to carve onto its […]
A Rollicking Adventure
It may be hindsight, but some writers appear destined to write particular books. Take, for example, Robert J Harris and his new novel The Thirty-One Kings, which brings together several of Scottish author John Buchan’s most popular characters—including Richard Hannay of The Thirty-Nine Steps—in a new adventure set during the early part of […]
Irvine Welsh: Classic Tales and New Directions
For a writer who had three shows running during this year’s 70th anniversary Edinburgh Festival Fringe, theatre didn’t feature that much in his life when Leith-born Irvine Welsh was growing up. “Apart from panto at the King’s Theatre—Stanley Baxter, Ronnie Corbett and all that—it was never a big thing for me,” he says. […]
Cautious Optimism for the Environment Post-Brexit
One of Scotland’s best-known naturalists and conservationists is “quietly confident” that Brexit won’t automatically lead to declining environmental standards—as long as we’re careful. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to promote his new memoirs, Sir John Lister-Kaye admitted to being worried about the situation but also thought “it might be quite healthy”. “What’s happened […]
Lack of a Scottish Film Studio ‘a Disgrace’, says John Gordon Sinclair
The lack of a proper film studio in Scotland is “shameful” and “a disgrace”, according to John Gordon Sinclair, star of iconic 1981 film Gregory’s Girl. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, while promoting his third crime novel Walk in Silence, the actor and author was asked by an audience member for his perspective […]
Queen of the Clyde
To the Cunard board that had commissioned her, the new liner was simply designated Q4, the fourth class of “Queen” to join the Cunard passenger fleet. At John Brown’s Shipyard, Clydebank, where some 3,000 men spent two years constructing the 58,000-ton liner, she was “No 736 express passenger liner”. Neither, of course, were destined to […]
