RIP …

… Alasdair Gray, influential Scottish writer and artist, dies aged 85 | Books | The Guardian.

The novelist Ali Smith called Gray “a modern-day William Blake” and said: “He was an artist in every form. He was a renaissance man. His generosity and brilliance in person – felt by everyone who knew him even a little – were a source of astonishing and liberating warmth. The few times I met him in life, he was all these things in a unique combination of polite, frank, detached (or maybe more truly differently attached), sanguine, many-voiced, wise, warm, kind, hilarious, acutely truth-telling, uncompromisingly articulate