Book review: Poverty Safari by Darren McGarvey

Readers of The Scotsman have come to know Darren McGarvey as an unusually scrupulous columnist, one who argues with himself as much as with anyone else. His columns are often exploratory; it’s his own response to experience that he is exploring. In doing so, he challenges himself. The act of self-criticism moderates his criticism of others. He coined the phrase “Poverty Safari” when an artist was given a grant to spend a year in Glasgow exploring “the Glasgow Effect”; a piece, you might say, of self-indulgent tourism, and that is more or less what he did say. Then he revised his ungenerous opinion; he recognised that the artist was serious, not condescendingly slumming it.