Alastair Reid – författare

This comprehensive study examines British shipbuilding and industrial relations from 1870 to 1950, addressing economic, social and political history to provide an holistic approach to industry, trade-unionism and the early history of the Labour Party.Examining the impact of new machinery, of independent rank-and-file movements and of craft and trade unions, The Tide of Democracy provides an authoritative account of industrial action in shipyards in the period and their effect on the birth and development of the Labour Party. This volume is clearly presented, elegantly written and suffused with a distinctly human touch which brings the technical material to life. Unique in the combined attention it gives to Scottish and English history, and drawing upon an impressive range of primary sources, this volume will be indispensable for specialist researchers, undergraduates and postgraduate students.

Alastair Reid began publishing poetry in the New Yorker in 1951 and has since contributed reviews, translations, stories, and reportage as well. Having lived variously in Scotland, the United States, Spain, France, Greece, Switzerland, Central and South America, Reid has until recently called Magazine his only permanent address.Many of the poems in Weathering arise from Reid’s itinerant life. Chosen by the poet from previous books published on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1950s, they range from the windowed corridors of New York city to Isla Negra, Chile, where the poet sits 'with the Pacific between my toes.'Whether lyric or narrative, whether moved by wit, irony, or humor, all Reid’s poems test the strength of language to ‘summon the moment when amazement ran through the senses like a flame’ and gauge the power of words to catch fire in an instant of realization. Including translations of poems by Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, and Jose Emilio Pacheco, Weathering displays the diverse talents of the poet, the recurring preoccupations of the itinerant traveler, seeking to encompass the world with words.

A Scottish-born writer based in the Dominican Republic here brings together seven of his pieces that originally appeared in the New Yorker, remarkable stories about his experiences in Spain, Latin America, Scotland and New York. The subject matter ranges from the lives and works of Borges, Neruda, Gracia Marquez and Jimenez, to learning a foreign language, to the differences between living in a home of one's own and living in the houses of other people. Reid also discusses his reasons for choosing to live under the Spanish dictatorship, toward which he had a strong antipathy. "Being in Spain always felt much more like belonging to a conspiracy against the regime than like condoning it." The best known of these essays is "Digging Up Scotland," a long account of the author's return in 1980 to St. Andrew's on the North Sea with his son Jasper and friends to find a box they had buried in 1971.