Many people, including myself, who have visited the battlefield of Culloden report being underwhelmed. It amounts to little more than a rickle of stones on a heather moor. The battle itself in 1746 had lasted less than an hour, and the forces on each side were small, even by the standards of the day. The […]
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Subtitled ‘Documents relating to the case of Roderick Macrae’, His Bloody Project contains the memoir of a 17-year-old crofter, written while awaiting trial in Inverness in 1869 for three brutal murders, and ‘discovered’ by the author while researching his own Highland roots. This manuscript, we are informed, divided the Edinburgh literati of the time, who feared
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Nan (Anna) Shepherd (11 February 1893 – 23 February 1981, http://www.slainte.org.uk/CILIPS/publications/scotauth/shephdsw.htm) was a Scottish novelist and poet who was born and lived most of her life in the Aberdeenshire village of West Cults. She became an early Scottish Modernist writer, producing three stand alone novels set in small, fictional, communities in the north of Scotland. The Scottish
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Alistair Moffat was born and bred in the Scottish Borders. A former Director of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Director of Programmes at Scottish Television, he now runs the Borders Book Festival. He is the author of a number of highly acclaimed books and is a former Rector of St. Andrews University. In this new single volume
Val McDermid (http://www.valmcdermid.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_mcdermid) will need little introduction to her many fans or to the readers of these reviews. Her new stand alone book has been published in September of 2014 and the summary is as follows: When a skeleton is discovered hidden at the top of a crumbling, gothic building in Edinburgh, Detective Chief Inspector Karen
It’s not often you find top ten best selling popular fiction set in Carluke. Yet here we have it in the latest outing from Quintin Jardine (http://www.quintinjardine.com/). This is a story of a man’s quest for justice at any cost. The summary is as follows. It’s 1818 in Carluke, Lanarkshire. Mathew Fleming returns home to
This month I’m only going to make one suggestion. It is Tom Devine’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Devine)(http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/history-classics-archaeology/about-us/staff-profiles?cw_xml=profile_tab1_academic.php?uun=tdevine) monumental 720 page history of Scotland – ‘The Scottish Nation‘. As I write there are 23 days to the referendum which will decide if Scotland remains in a union with the rest of the UK. This will unquestionably be the most historic
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Patrick Doyle is a 29-year-old teacher in an ordinary school. Frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher. A Disaffection (1989) is the apparently straightforward story of one week in a man’s life in which he decides
Ken is a scientist, with a scientist’s dispassionate eye for the material world. He reviews his life from the difficult 1930s, through the slaughter of World War I, back to an idyllic boyhood in the Highlands. When the mature man finally reaches the source of the river that has haunted his imagination for so many
