Even when it is expected, a death is a shock, and despite the characteristic levity and openness with which Iain Banks prepared the world for his departure with
It’s been twenty five years since the publication of Consider Phlebas, the novel that introduced readers to the Culture, a highly advanced interplanetary civilisation, its Contact branch and
Is it only a fellow writer who, when reading a great novel, speculates how much was conceived in a flood of inspiration at the moment of conception, and
