Bookworm: ‘I have a list of people who could be improved by flying saucer’

WHEN it comes to politics, Alexander McCall Smith is studiously neutral: pressed on what his characters will make of the independence debate at last week’s Scotsman Literary Dinner, he said he hadn’t yet made up his own mind and could see both points of view.

But when asked about how he handles villainous characters, he gave a particularly interesting answer. Although he liked Iris Murdoch’s novel The Philosopher’s Pupil, in which bad characters are redeemed one by one, he said that he thought she had rather cheated when it came to redeeming the most villainous character of them all – who was changed only by seeing a flying saucer.

“I have a list of people who could be improved by flying saucer,” he told an appreciative audience at Edinburgh’s Grovenor Hilton hotel. “In fact, I was thinking of Alex Salmond only this afternoon. I think he’s going to see a flying saucer – the big debate is whether he should see it next month or in 2014.”

He also revealed that the way in which the triplet babies in 44 Scotland Street are distinguished from one another – by different colours of nail varnish on their little toes – was suggested by a relative’s system of checking up on whether garage mechanics had got to grips with various parts of the car engine as promised. Whether AL Kennedy or Will Self – the next guests at the Scotsman Literary Dinners – will come up with such handy hints or suggest such political close encounters, we shall have to wait until 5 April to find out.

KISS OF DEATH

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, we’d better admit it straight off: this is a hopeless age for love letters. The 2000 Years of Romance exhibition at the British Library shows how much we’ve lost. Admittedly, there’s nothing particularly sweet and soppy about its earliest exhibit, in which a Greek-Egyptian woman in 168BC asks her husband to come home.

We’re getting a bit warmer with the first Valentine in the English language, Margery Brews’s 1477 letter to her fiance (“Yf that ye loffe me as I tryste verely that ye do ye will not leffe me”), but for the real hot stuff you have to wait for the early 20th century. Here, for example, is Rupert Brooke, writing to Cathleen Nesbitt in 1913 – “I shall kiss you until I kill you”. Nesbitt, an actress, went on to have one of the longest careers in showbusiness. She died aged 93 in London in 1982. If you’ve ever seen French Connection II (1975), remember the elderly drug addict? That’s her.