Humpback whale bumps into kayakers in rare foray into waters off Oban

The director who launched Jennifer Lawrence has found another star in Thomasin McKenzie, who excels as a girl living on the margins with her father in Leave No Trace

Margalit Fox, recently retired from her position as chief obituary writer for the New York Times, has addressed one of the most shameful miscarriages of justice in Scottish legal history – the conviction of Oscar Slater for the murder of Marion Gilchrist in 1908 – and the part played by Arthur Conan Doyle in Slater’s eventual release and exoneration after almost 20 years in Peterhead Prison. There is no doubt now that Slater was innocent, and there should never have been any. Fox, unlike some who have written about the case, isn’t interested in speculating about who actually killed Miss Gilchrist. She does touch on the question in the last chapter of her lucid and engaging book, but sensibly observes that “any ‘solution’ advanced 11 decades after the fact can only be the product of undiluted speculation”.

Much is made by Shakespeare scholars of the repetition of negative words and phrases in King Lear and the way in which this contributes to the overall mood of the play, but when it comes to relentless deployment of the language of negation, South African author Katherine Kilalea could probably have taught the Bard a thing or three. Her debut novel OK, Mr Field, is a veritable riot of negativity, an orgy of absence. In narrative terms, it is the story of one man’s failure to achieve anything much, drip-fed over the course of 200 pages, but narrative isn’t the primary concern here – instead, we have an exquisitely uncomfortable study of ennui.