Much as life in Lanark and dear old Blighty is unsatisfactory we do not fear being snatched away to a detention centre and tortured because the government does not share our opinions. There are, of course, plenty of regimes in this world where that is the case. In 1990, Jaballa Matar, an exiled Lybian dissident […]
The Return by Hisham Matar Read More »
Ann Patchett’s (http://www.annpatchett.com/about/) new novel is an American family saga involving six children, 50 years and many coincidences. It opens with Bert, a father of three with another baby on the way, sneaking a kiss from Beverly, a married woman hosting a christening party for her second child, Frances. They’re drunk and it’s the Sixties;
As we say goodbye to 2016, commentators are suggesting that the past 12 months have been a threshold year. It could be that the twentieth century ended in 2016 in the same way as historians regard the nineteenth century as ending at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. One of the transformations
The Wealth of Humans by Ryan Avent Read More »
Stephen Leather (http://www.stephenleather.com/) has been entertaining us for nearly 20 years with his novels of crime, imprisonment, military service, and terrorism. He’s certainly tapped into the zeitgeist because our daily news is saturated with crime, war, terrorism, death and destruction. Every night brings further gory detail about the bloodbath in The Middle East. The appetite for
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
His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet Read More »
Standard histories of philosophy treat the subject in a methodical and scholarly fashion, attempting to encapsulate the whole business in a short number of volumes. Bertrand Russell’s ‘History of Western Philosophy‘, Freddie Copleston’s ‘A History of Philosophy’ (11 vols.), and Anthony Kenny’s ‘A New History of Western Philosophy‘ (originally 3 volumes) have been ready to
The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb Read More »
It has sometimes been noted that Lanark is a resolutely conservative place. Conservative with a small ‘c’, that is. There are few actual Tories, of course. Instead it is a small town working class conservatism whose rallying cry glories in the phrase ‘it’s aye been!!’. Well, it may have ‘aye been’, but originality is the lifeblood of
Originals by Adam Grant Read More »
The SAS was the brainchild of David Stirling, a languid young Scottish aristocrat. With difficulty he persuaded General Claude Auchinleck, the 8th Army commander in WW 2, to approve a mobile force operating behind enemy lines. The plan was to disrupt communications and infiltrate aerodromes to destroy planes on the ground. He gathered a motley
This book was first published on 4th August 2016. 96 days later Donald Trump was elected President of The United States. For all that time, and ever since Trump had secured the nomination, the Democrats and the ruling elites around the world were smugly confident that a clown like Trump could never be elected. Their
White Trash by Nancy Isenberg Read More »
