Book review: Motherwell, by Deborah Orr

Motherwell is a memoir, not a full autobiography, completed a few months before the cancer Deborah Orr had thought herself free of returned suddenly and brutally to kill her, aged only 57. It will be bought eagerly by those who admired and enjoyed her trenchant and generous journalism but it should also be read by many who have never opened a copy of the Guardian or the Independent. It is both a family memoir and a social study. It tells you a lot about Scotland, about economic change and the shift from a repressed to a more liberal culture.