Old Men in Love
By Alasdair Gray
Bloomsbury £8.99, 320 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.19

Old Men in Love gathers the jottings of the late John Tunnock, a Glaswegian socialist and retired headmaster, seemingly edited and glossed by local novelist Alasdair Gray and capped with a tart epilogue from a disgruntled critic that disparages Gray’s career.

Within this metafiction is Tunnock’s exuberant recollection of schoolboy experiments with masturbation, and scrapes with the clutch of disruptive women that dominate his retired years. Spliced into his garrulous memoir are gobbets of Tunnock’s lofty literary ambitions: notes on evolution, literature, Scottish nationalism, the failure of New Labour, and a few chapters on the sex life of Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi.

Such diverse stories of men in love offer a looping theme for this curious, meandering novel but, unless you have an acquired taste for rather arch digressions, the book remains less than the sum of its witty but disparate parts.