UK: Fact imitates fiction

Edinburgh University staged an event last week that was in the excellent tradition of life imitating art. A distinguished American scholar gave a public lecture on the poet WH Auden which brought to life a scene from a novel by a distinguished author, also a former professor of the university.

Alexander McCall Smith, creator of the literary sleuth Isabel Dalhousie in the Sunday Philosophy Club books, who was professor of medical law at Edinburgh, introduced Edward Mendelson from Columbia University.

Mendelson, a professor of English and comparative literature, and the Lionel Trilling professor in the humanities at the university, is the literary executor of Auden's estate and has edited a collection of his poems. He titled his address: W H Auden and the Case of the Imaginative Conscience.

The event brought to life a scene from McCall Smith's latest book, The Comfort of Saturdays, in which Mendelson gives a lecture on Auden attended by Dalhousie. The salient chapter begins:

"She felt elated when she sat down for the lecture...so a child might feel on Christmas Eve, she thought - filled with anticipation for the gifts to come."

It is hoped that the audience felt the same in real life.