STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves

I’M NOT sure the Guild of Literary Critics include it in their list of approved descriptions, but really, “gorgeous” is the only word that makes sense of Alan Moore’s The Great When (Bloomsbury, £20).
It’s one of those lavish cakes of a book which is so full of plums — hilarious and horrific, touching and obscene, surreal and familiar — that you can’t help gorging yourself on it.
It belongs to the small but much-loved subgenre of “hidden London” fantasies, in which another version of the city overlaps or intersects with the one we know.

Edinburgh can take great pride in an episode of its history where a murderous captain of the city guard was brought to justice by a righteous crowd — and nobody snitched to Westminster in the aftermath, writes MAT COWARD


