[2][4] After hitchhiking through Europe, Israel and North Africa,[5] he studied to gain acceptance to the University of Edinburgh (1974–78).
[9] A revised edition of Talking at the Gates, with a new introduction and an interview with Norman Mailer about Baldwin, was published in 2021.
A selection of the columns was published in 2023 under the title NB by J.C.: A Walk through the Times Literary Supplement.
Reviewing the collection in The New York Times, Dwight Garner wrote: "one part of the TLS no one skips, in my experience, is the NB column .
[11] As a writer for The Guardian in the first decade of the present century, he wrote some fifty profiles of literary figures, including Ian Hamilton Finlay, Shirley Hazzard, Arthur Miller, Gary Snyder and John Updike.