Allan Massie

Allan Massie (born 1938) is a well-known Scottish journalist, novelist and establishment figure.

Early life

Born in 1938 in Singapore, where his father was a rubber planter for Sime Darby, Massie spent his childhood in Aberdeenshire. He was educated at the expensive fee-paying private schools Drumtochty Castle preparatory school and Glenalmond College, then attending Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has lived in the Scottish Borders for the last 25 years, and now lives in Selkirk.

Career

Journalist

Massie is one of Scotland's most prolific and well-known journalists, writing regular columns for The Scotsman, The Sunday Times (Scotland) and the Scottish Daily Mail. He has been The Scotsman's chief fiction reviewer for a quarter of a century and also regularly writes about rugby union and cricket for that paper. He has previously been a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, the Glasgow Herald, and was the Sunday Standard's television critic during that paper's brief existence. He is also a contributor to The Spectator - where he writes a weekly column, Life and Letters - the Literary Review and The Independent. He has also written for the New York Review of Books.

He is well known for advocating a Tory viewpoint, though this has been a losing battle given the decline of Conservative influence in Scotland (it is currently the fourth party). He was a leading, if lonely, campaigner against Scottish devolution and a critic of much of the legislation passed by the Scottish Parliament since it came into existence after the 1997 general election. His political views on devolution changed during the Thatcher years and he came to regret his support for the 1979 devolution referendum.

In his literary reviews, his preferences lie towards traditional novels rather than the avant-garde. He is a great admirer of Sir Walter Scott (and a past president of the Sir Walter Scott Club). Among contemporary novelists, he is a champion of the Russian writer Andreï Makine and Scotland's William McIlvanney. Though he has criticised Irvine Welsh and James Kelman, he has admired some of the latter's work, arguing that Kelman is an important voice for a section of society often ignored in literary fiction.

Novelist

He is the author of nearly 30 books, including 19 novels. He is notable for writing about the distant past, and the middle class, rather than grittier elements of the present. The most successful of his novels, at least in terms of sales, have been a series of reconstructed autobiographies or biographies of Roman political figures, including Augustus, Tiberius, Mark Antony, Caesar, Caligula and Nero's Heirs. Gore Vidal has called him a "master of the long-ago historical novel." His most recent book is The Thistle and the Rose, a series of essays on the often thorny relationship between Scotland and England, in which he takes a strong Unionist viewpoint.

His 1986 novel about Vichy France, A Question of Loyalties won the Saltire award for being the best Scottish book of the year - an award he has been shortlisted for more than once. The Sins of the Fathers (1991) caused a controversy when Nicholas Mosley resigned from the judging panel for the Booker Prize, protesting that none of his books (of which Massie's was the favourite) made it on to the shortlist (Martin Amis' Times Arrow edged out Massie's novel for the final spot on the six book list).

Those two novels, and Shadows of Empire constitute a loose trilogy in which a constant concern is the potential danger of idealism and ideology, as well as the struggle to lead a decent personal life in indecent political times.

Other works include critical studies of Muriel Spark and Colette as well as histories of Edinburgh and Glasgow and A Portrait of Scottish Rugby.

Novels, in order of publication

• Change and Decay in All Around I See
• The Last Peacock
• The Death of Men
• One Night in Winter
• Augustus
• A Question of Loyalties
• Tiberius
• The Hanging Tree
• The Sins of the Father
• Caesar
• The Ragged Lion
• These Enchanted Woods (sequel to The Last Peacock)
• King David
• Shadows of Empire
• Anthony
• Nero's Heirs
• The Evening of the World
• Arthur the King
• Caligula

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