Glasgow: The Autobiography tells the story of the fabled, former Second City of the British Empire from its origins as a bucolic village on the rivers Kelvin and Clyde, through the tumult of the Industrial Revolution to the third millennium.Including extracts from an astonishing array of contributors from Daniel Defoe, Dorothy Wordsworth and Dr Johnson to Evelyn Waugh and Dirk Bogarde, it also features the writing of bred-in-thebone Glaswegians such as Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead, James Kelman and 2020 Booker prize-winner Douglas Stuart. The result is a varied and vivid portrait of one of the world's great cities in all its grime and glory a place which is at once infuriating, inspiring, raucous, humourful and never, ever dull.

Alan Taylor has been a journalist for over 30 years. He was deputy and managing editor at the Scotsman, and for the last 15 years has been Writer-at-Large for the Sunday Herald. He has contributed to numerous publications, including The TLS, The New Yorker and The Melbourne Age, and edited three acclaimed anthologies - The Assassin's Cloak (2000), The Secret Annexe (2004) and The Country Dairies (2009).