I had arrived at the Greek view of nature. In wood and river and plant and animal and bird and insect it had seemed to me there was a spirit which was the same as my spirit… Born in Belfast in 1875, Forrest Reid would earn a reputation as the first Ulster novelist of European stature. He studied at Cambridge, but it was Belfast where Reid returned to make his home, and where his questing mind seemed to find all that it required of inspiration. As he writes in Apostate (1926), the first of two volumes of autobiography The landscape was the landscape I loved best, a landscape proclaiming the vicinity of man, a landscape imbued with a human spirit that was yet somehow divine.'