LAST week I encountered the earliest deployment of the word “paralytic” I know to convey the state of alcoholic intoxication. It is included in a report by a Sir John Hammerton, native of Alexandria in Dunbartonshire. Sir John, who seems to have been a squeamish type, was describing his experiences of a night out in 1889 in Glasgow’s Trongate district. “Jollity was everywhere absent,” he observed, while “sheer loathsome, swinish inebriation prevailed”.

Sir John’s description of Glasgow’s Victorian-era drinking classes is contained in a new anthology of writing about the city collected and choreographed by Alan Taylor, a journalist and editor. Taylor, born and raised in Edinburgh, has become a devotee of Glasgow. In his entertaining Introduction to Glasgow: The Autobiography he recalls a childhood warning about the evils of the city by the Clyde. “A teacher said that should we ever feel the need to go west we ought to be aware that we would be unlikely to return in one piece and that if we did we could expect to have scars of which a musketeer would have been proud.”

His biography of Glasgow spans 420 years, starting with an episcopal abjuration of witchcraft in the city to an account of the demolition of the Red Road flats. And though there is a great deal of affection in between, Taylor is unsparing when choosing chillier and unflattering accounts.

The earlier reflections on Glasgow convey the foundations of its character and reputation. In Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1817) the Highland influence on the city is observed in an unkind light. “Hordes of wild, shaggy, dwarfish cattle and ponies, conducted by Highlanders, as wild, as shaggy, and sometimes as dwarfish as the animals they had in charge, often traversed the streets of Glasgow.”

Here too is a letter confirming that the world’s first organised football match was played in Glasgow on August 1, 1868. There is an account of the trial and acquittal of Madeleine Smith who, in 1857, had stood accused of poisoning her French lover. The report, an elegant and electrifying description of the accused, appeared in The Illustrated London News and makes you wonder why modern newspapers have chosen to dispense with this ring-side reportage of the big court cases.

My favourite sentence in the collection comes from the pen of the journalist and novelist Neil Munro, author of the Para Handy tales. Here he is offering a description of a backstage altercation witnessed by him between a truculent actor and an irascible and half-dressed theatre owner called O’Grady. “A painful scene, in which Madame O’Grady, also in dishabille, joined her husband and helped him to express his sentiments about us where his own pretty extensive vocabulary fell short.” Around 100 years later another Munro (Michael) was giving the world the keys to the Glasgow dialect in The Patter where the source and etymology of words and phrases such as “bampot” and “electric soup” were revealed.

ANY collection which aspires to curate the most vivid writing about this most vivid of cities would be inauthentic without an example of James Kelman’s spare and surgical prose. In The Busconductor Hines, the protagonist provides the world’s most authoritative recipe for mince and tatties, a 700-word treatise which includes the line “sit on arse for following hour apart from occasional checks and stirring”.

Nor would any Glasgow treasury be worth printing if a significant portion of it wasn’t given over to accounts of the social inequalities which have afflicted this city. Over-crowding, squalor, multi-deprivation, disease and early death have all contributed to the withered DNA of this city. They are all chronicled starkly and with no little humour.

A report by the Superintendent of Police in 1842 describes the conditions “east of the High Street” as “wretched, dissolute, loathsome and pestilential”. In 1934, Lewis Grassic Gibbon found in Glasgow “over a hundred and fifty thousand human beings living in conditions as the most bitterly pressed primitive in Tierra del Fuego never visioned”. In 1975 Cathy McCormick, of Easterhouse, chronicled the horrors in the biggest housing scheme in Europe which included chronic dampness, cold and exploitation by fuel suppliers inside a home she describes as “a concrete bunker”.

When exactly the same inequalities recur in every generation in the same places and for the same reasons then it becomes clear that whatever else we think Scotland is it is not very fair and not very enlightened.

We Glaswegians are wont to make a Hollywood production of our city. In our vivid imaginations no other city has a bigger heart or possesses more generosity of spirit; we are all undiscovered Billy Connollys. What this compendium tells us is that we are also a city of opposites: confident and insecure; gentle and irascible; emotional and unsentimental; religious and profane.

Taylor once told me why he enjoyed the company of Glaswegians. “I love their perverse optimism, the sense they have of themselves, their storytelling; their easy wit. Ask any Glaswegian where they come from and he or she won’t say Scotland; they’ll say Glasgow. Such pride of place is infectious.”

Glasgow: The Autobiography is his gift to us. In return I now claim him as a Glaswegian in practice and in spirit. The induction ceremony will be conducted in “sheer loathsome, swinish inebriation”.