James Kelman has long been regarded as one of the finest writers of fiction in the world. In this brilliant collection of essays he deals with matters literary, artistic, political and philosophical. In the essay ' "And the Judges Said..." ' Kelman outlines some of the influences that led him to create literary art, from the music he heard as a teenager to American and Russian writers, to the lives of the Impressionists. Elsewhere he looks at the role of elitism in literature, the central importance of Chomsky's work in twentieth-century thought and the work of the Caribbean Artists Movement. There are essays on the struggle to save the steel industry in Scotland and on the situation of the Kurds in Turkey; at the core of the collection is an extended essay on Franz Kafka.