A literary critic, cultural historian and poet, David Daiches was one of Scotland's most distinguished writers. His academic career took him to the United States, where he taught at Cornell and Chicago Universities, and to Cambridge and Sussex, before he returned to Edinburgh, the city in which he grew up. Described by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid as 'the foremost living authority on our literature', he wrote pioneering re-evaluations of Burns, Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. He also published works on Prince Charles Edward Stuart, Scotch whisky and the monuments of Glasgow and Edinburgh. This searching drawing is one of a series made by Gunn Cairns