Allan Massie, outstanding Scottish novelist, critic and High Tory political commentator

Allan Massie, who has died aged 87, was a critic and commentator of great seriousness and astonishing fecundity, as well as one of Scotland’s finest novelists; his series of fictions examining the lives of the Roman emperors prompted Gore Vidal to call him a “master of the long-ago historical novel”.

As a High-Tory, Unionist, Romantic Scotsman with a limitless capacity for work, highly imaginative but politically hard-headed, and ensconced in the Borders, he was in several ways comparable with his hero Sir Walter Scott. But the many passionate admirers of his fiction frequently grumbled that he was underrated by the literary establishment.

In 1991 the novelist Nicholas Mosley went so far as to resign from the Booker Prize judging panel when the other judges refused to shortlist Massie’s book The Sins of the Father on the grounds that it was too much of a “novel of ideas”.

Massie remained better known to many people as a journalist. He was a prolific political pundit, literary critic and writer on sport (especially rugby), and during a long association with The Daily Telegraph he interviewed figures such as Margaret Thatcher and contributed innumerable op-eds, reviews and, latterly, blog posts.

He was also a regular columnist at various times for The Spectator, Daily Mail, The Sunday Times and The Scotsman. Magnus Linklater observed with astonishment in 1997 that “over the past few years his productivity rate has outstripped even that of writers as tireless as Paul Johnson and Auberon Waugh.”

He was an unwearying commentator on Scottish affairs, notably as a critic of devolution and the SNP, and some thought his views were held against him. “Massie tends to be slightly overlooked in discussions of contemporary Scottish literature,” Stuart Kelly noted in The Guardian in 2013, “the peril, I presume, of being an intelligent Conservative.”

His preference for setting his novels in other times and lands may also have prevented him from being more often numbered among the best Scottish novelists of his generation alongside such fashionable explorers of Scotland’s urban culture and language as William McIlvanney, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman. But Massie found that Scotland was an insufficient stage for his favourite theme of the brutality of power struggles, and liked to quote Hugh MacDiarmid’s view: “The trouble with Scotland is that there’s nobody worth killing.”

One of his early novels, One Night in Winter (1984), did deal directly with fanatical nationalism and Scotland’s existential plight. “Things would have been different if we hadn’t been Scots,” says one character. “It made us in love with defeat.” But if Massie detected a national inferiority complex, he did not share it; when asked if he thought Scotland had been colonised by England, he replied: “It’s much more true to say England is Scotland’s most successful colony.”

Massie first tackled ancient Rome in a non-fiction work, The Caesars (1983), and followed it in 1986 with the novel Augustus. A cod-introduction by an imaginary academic states that the book is translated by Allan Massie (“author of a deft, if derivative, study of the Caesars”) from a recently discovered manuscript of the emperor’s memoirs in Latin.

Massie certainly relished the political and sexual scandals of the period, but his greatest achievement was to depict Augustus convincingly as a man who was unrepentantly ruthless in both politics and private life and yet was not corrupted by absolute power and became the pater patriae, the benign father of his country during one of its most civilised periods. Massie went on to “translate” more newly unearthed biographies and autobiographies in Tiberius (1991), Caesar (1993), Antony (1997), Nero’s Heirs (1999) and Caligula (2003).

Massie took the view that it was absurd for novelists to pretend that they could recreate the distant past, and deliberately introduced anachronisms into the books. His Romans often quote Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde, the more epicene ones address each other as “ducky”, and 20th-century political slogans abound: at one point political negotiations are carried out “over beer and sandwiches”. When Brutus says: “I have heard [Julius] Caesar deny the very existence of society,” the reader is meant to recall another political figure who was brought low by conspirators when she got too big for her boots.

The combination of high seriousness with playfulness and bawdry seemed appropriately Roman, and as outstanding novels of the ancient world the first three books in particular may be ranked with the work of Robert Graves and Mary Renault.

Many readers, and Massie himself, thought that his best work was his loose trilogy of novels exploring the moral conundrums thrown up by the Second World War. A Question of Loyalties (1989), which won the Saltire Society award, tells the story of a man attempting to discover why his late father, a government minister in Vichy France, chose to collaborate with the Nazis rather than resist them; Massie managed to combine a moving sympathy for those who have to face such dilemmas with a heartfelt warning of the dangers of loyalty to ideology.

It was followed by The Sins of the Father (1991), about the belated trial of a Nazi war criminal loosely based on Eichmann, and Shadows of Empire (1997), a saga following four brothers through the 20th century. Although Massie himself admitted that some of his fiction could be “too cerebral and reflective”, these three novels combine philosophical depth with an emotional charge to a rare and memorable degree.

Allan Johnstone Massie was born on October 16 1938 in Singapore; his father Alexander, an Aberdeenshire man, was working as a rubber planter in Johor. Before he was a year old, Allan went with his mother Evelyn to live near Aberdeen on a farm she had inherited. His father was taken prisoner by the Japanese and suffered grievously; after the War he found it hard to settle in Scotland, returned to Malaya and later divorced his wife.

Allan was greatly upset by his father’s absence. “I felt a lack, and this curious thing that the children of divorced people often have, a sense of guilt… At school I never let on my parents were divorced, there was a feeling in those days that people from broken homes somehow weren’t trustworthy. But I remained very fond of him.” Massie had little truck with journalists who tried to relate difficult father-son relationships in his fiction to his own experiences. Late in life, to his delight, his parents remarried.

He was educated at Trinity College, Glenalmond, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history and was repeatedly outbluffed at the poker table by the future playwright Simon Gray, who became a lifelong friend – “the funniest man I knew”. He did not embark on a PhD, owing, he hinted later, “to a difference of opinion with the [college] authorities”.

Instead he returned in 1960 to teach at his old prep school, housed in the neo-Gothic Drumtochty Castle in Kincardineshire, where he met his future wife Alison Langlands, the daughter of the proprietors, and his duties included repelling bailiffs from the battlements. Alison’s sister, the novelist Elspeth Barker, later remembered her brother-in-law as a popular and stimulating teacher, and recalled that although he never learnt to drive he bought himself a stylish car in which he liked to sit outside his home, until one day he left the handbrake off and it disappeared.

After the school went bankrupt, he taught English in Rome from 1972 to 1975, and then lived briefly in Edinburgh before settling in a beautiful dower house in the Borders where he kept chickens and horses; he felt that the presence a few miles away of Abbotsford, the home of his beloved Walter Scott, spurred him on to write better.

In 1976 he began to review fiction for The Scotsman, a billet he held for 50 years until his retirement last month. After several false starts he completed and published his first novel, Change and Decay in All Around I See (1978), which he later described as “a somewhat scrappy comedy of low life in London”. He was pleased at the time with a party scene that lasted for several pages with all the dialogue left unattributed, but later came to regard such feats of ingenuity as rather pointless.

He was not keen, as writer or reviewer, on the avant-garde. In 1984 he presented a talk on Radio 3, Against Oddity, in which he argued that novelists should eschew “arid and frivolous” experimental fiction. When he was Fellow of Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh he was approached by the young Ian Rankin, seeking advice after finding that the serious literary work he had planned had somehow turned into a thriller; Massie told him not to worry, declaring: “Who would be James Joyce if he could be John Buchan?”

An extremely heavy drinker in his younger days, prone to extended binges in which he might have “lost weekends”, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous when he lived in Rome, where he benefited from the support of a fellow member, Dylan Thomas’s widow Caitlin. He used his experiences to moving effect in One Night in Winter, described by Richard Cobb as the best novel about drink he had read, and later in Surviving (2009), about the strong bonds between a group of expat alcoholics in Rome, which he regarded as his most personal novel. Although he gave up drink, he remained a keen smoker, latterly switching from untipped French cigarettes to Toscano cigars, as favoured by Clint Eastwood in his Spaghetti Westerns.

Massie enjoyed a late success when he returned to Vichy France in Death in Bordeaux (2010), the first in a splendid quartet of crime novels featuring the Maigret-like Superintendent Lannes, calm and redoubtable but tormented by conflicting loyalties. The period is summed up in the final volume, End Games in Bordeaux (2015), when Massie has the young François Mitterrand say: “Vichy was necessary. I’ll never deny that – except in public.”

Massie had an air of Olympian omniscience that was conveyed through the range of his journalism and his fiction, though DJ Taylor in The Guardian was surprised by the rortiness of his novel These Enchanted Woods (1993), because “the author occasionally comes across as a dry old stick.” Anthony Powell recorded in his Journals in 1984 that “I like Allan Massie, notwithstanding a somewhat forbidding Scotch buttoned-upness.” In fact, Massie in person had a gentle and kindly manner and was generous in offering help to younger writers.

Altogether he wrote more than two dozen novels and numerous works of non-fiction, including studies of Muriel Spark (1979) and Colette (1986), A Portrait of Scottish Rugby (1984), The Novelist’s View of the Market Economy (1988), and a much-praised history of the relationship between Scotland and England, The Thistle and the Rose (2005). His play The Ragged Lion was a dramatisation of his novel of 1994 about the life of Walter Scott.

Allan Massie was appointed CBE in 2013. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

He married, in 1973, Alison Langlands, to whom he dedicated every one of his books; she predeceased him, and he is survived by a daughter, Claudia, a painter and documentary producer, and two sons, Alex and Louis, who are both journalists.

Allan Massie, born October 16 1938, died February 3 2026

[Source: Daily Telegraph]