ROBERT Louis Stevenson wrote almost 3000 letters. He is the subject of numerous biographies and a website organised and maintained by Edinburgh Napier University. There are journals and conferences in his name and events in his honour. In short, finding a new angle on RLS is no easy feat.
IN 1978 General Sir John Hackett published The Third World War, August 1985: A Future History. Written as a novel but in the style of a non-fiction, post-event analysis it tells of a Third World War between Nato and the Warsaw Pact forces. Though fictional, it built on Hackett’s reputation as a military strategist and reinforced his previously expressed belief that the UK government was complacent about Nato’s capabilities in Europe.
MOSCOW-based British journalist Alfred Cholerton once said of a Stalin show trial, “Everything is true except the facts”. Or did he? Elsewhere his remark is recorded as “I believe everything but the facts” which is not quite the same thing. A couple of millennia before him, Pontius Pilate asked “What is truth?” and wisely left the room before the discussion could take hold.
BACK in the day, a Glasgow Corporation bus destined for Yoker passed my grandmother’s house in Possilpark. Yoker sparked images of clowns and eggs in young minds and there was much childish speculation about where, or what, it was. Decades later, a spaced-out character called Dee Dee on Limmy’s Show notices a bus to Yoker and feels the urge to visit a “pure fabled land that sounds like a pure mad egg yolk”. What follows is a trip in both senses: an inner monologue mixing fear and paranoia with hope and discovery. Limmy (or Brian Limond by Sunday name) is known for his quick-fire comedy sketches and restless imagination. His first short story collection, Daft Wee Stories, gamely tried to transfer some of this to the page. There were daft stories, wee stories and stories that had to be read upside down. That’s Your Lot is his second book of short stories and here he adopts a more traditional approach.
IN 2016 the policy group Nordic Horizons organised an event in Edinburgh in which speakers from the Nordic countries explored their “smorgasbord” of relationships with the EU and whether post-Brexit Scotland could learn any lessons from their experiences. The presentations were subsequently transcribed and prepared for publication.
SOME historians believe that it was the success of the 1977 television mini-series Roots, based on the book by Alex Haley, which set North Americans of Scottish descent haring off in search of roots of their own. Genealogy flourished and Highland Games appeared from Alaska to Orlando.
IN a former life I was a librarian in a public library. As I recall, the duties included cataloguing, classification, manning the information desk and checking the toilet in case the bloke who entered it half an hour earlier had passed out or passed away.
IT IS not clear how Roger Scruton can be described as a heretic except as a self-conceit. His 1980 book The Meaning of Conservatism may have blighted his academic career, as he famously claimed, but many of his views are now in season. And in this co
RECENTLY mair nonsense has been uttered in the name of Keir Hardie than in ony’s barrin liberty and Christ. One of the many things to admire about Robert Duncan’s timely study of Scottish war resisters is that it rescues Hardie from contemporary
