Select all. Delete all

If you want to see Scotland’s superiority complex in action, take a look at its literary culture. The works of Hume, Boswell, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson adorn libraries the world over, and it suits Scotland’s arts lobby to pretend that the age of excellence is still alive. It’s great PR and it justifies the mighty wodges of tax-payer dosh that fund new writing north of the border. But when you seek out the latest Jock geniuses you find someone called David Harrower. Familiar name? Maybe not, but then he’s better known abroad than at home.

His most celebrated play Blackbird, written in 2005, told of a child-rape victim who met up with her molester 15 years later and found the stirrings of lurvve still tingling in her loins. Yeah, sure. The script was adopted by the inscrutable German opera-meister, Peter Stein, who brought it into the West End where it attracted yawns, and prizes, on every side.