STRANDED CONTENT
t is one of life’s exquisite ironies that the story behind a work deemed the first novel in English, a work of the strictest Puritan spiritualism, begins with indecent behaviour on consecrated grounds. We don’t know exactly what Alexander Selkirk — a young scallywag born in Fife in 1676 to a shoemaker and tanner — got up to under his or other churchgoers’ cassocks that day, but we do know that he failed
