EDWIN MORGAN’S NOTES ON THE BOOK OF MAN

The personal library of the late Edwin Morgan is now in a special collection at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. I heard he’d written some notes in the back of his copy of The Book of Man, so yesterday I visited the library to have a look.

The numbers refer to pages in the first edition, published by Serpent’s Tail. He rightly thought Michael Ilingworth was based on Alexander Trocchi, and that Tim McGuire was our mutual friend Tom McGrath. I never met Trocchi (he died when I was not quite 18),...