Trainspotting (film) Trainspotting (film) Trainspotting is a 1996 British black comedy film directed by Danny Boyle and starring Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Robert Carlyle, and Kelly Macdonald in her acting debut. Based on the novel of the same name by Irvine Welsh, the film was released in the United Kingdom on 23 February 1996. The Academy Award-nominated screenplay by John Hodge follows a group of heroin addicts in an economically depressed area of Edinburgh and their passage through life. Beyond drug addiction, other themes in the film are exploration of the urban poverty and squalor in "culturally
Richard Irvine Best Richard Irvine Best Richard Irvine Best (1872 – 25 September 1959), often known as R. I. Best, was an Irish scholar who specialised in Celtic Studies. Best was born into a Protestant family in Derry and educated at Foyle College before working for a time in a bank. As a young man he went to Paris to study Old Irish, where he met Kuno Meyer and attended Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville's lectures at the Collège de France. On his return to Ireland he translated the latter's "Le Cycle Mythologique Irlandais et la Mythologie Celtique" into English and became Assistant Director