IMAGINE you are one of the finest writers of your day, a poet, historian, journalist, translator, teacher, biographer, novelist and playwright so renowned that on the Blue Plaque that now sits outside your former home in London it simply calls you “man of letters”. Yet most people who know of you associate you with fairy stories and fables, with too many Scots unaware of your huge influence on writers and whole genres of writing.
That is what happened to Andrew Lang, the Scottish writer who died in this week of 1912. “Man of letters” is a truly accurate description of a writing powerhouse, a man whose genius touched millions without them ever really knowing that he did so.
