The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed, 1600-1900
FACING down a spitting cobra was probably good preparation for a career in Downing Street and at the IBA. Far from exceeding her brief, Barbara Hosking is a woman who knows no fear, except perhaps of loneliness, and she has remained far too busy for that. At 91, she has, at last, told the story of her remarkable life.
ONE of the most interesting characters in Anthony Powell’s multi-volume A Dance to the Music of Time is the ageing don Sillery, whose subject, like Niall Ferguson’s here, seems to be political science, but whose real avocation is forming useful connections among the undergraduate body. This is the activity which, writ large in the public realm, Ferguson believes to be the real source of power in the modern world. Or rather, it is the dialectical trade-off between networks and hierarchies – with one or other dominant at any one time, and the former very much in the saddle now – which shapes governance and political influence.
SOME years ago, BBC Scotland hired an expensive demographics wonk to look at the station’s audience profile. Among his more startling findings – along with the alarming news that people tended to switch off the radio at the end of programmes – was that the “typical” listener to an arts programme that I then presented was a 59-year-old retired farmer in Perthshire. My first reaction was that farmers don’t ever really retire, surely? My second was that maybe only in lush Perthshire can they afford to.
THE first Scottish reference to the hen harrier comes in The Fenyeit Friar of Tungland, a Middle Scots poem by William Dunbar. It’s the satirical tale of a false Italian abbot, John Damian, who tries, Icarus-like, to usurp the birds’ domain in false feathers. Dunbar, who is of the birds’ party, describes how the wildfowl set upon the charlatan “with a yowle”. In their number are “The myttane and Sanct Martynis fowle”. The latter name – as le busard Saint Martin – is still used in France, in reference to the time of year when this most elegant raptor appears. The former name is more puzzling, but almost certainly points to the larger “ringtail” female which for centuries was considered to be an entirely different species.
A YOUNG woman supervises the shooting of an eight-pointer stag high above the sea-cliffs of Rum.
COLUMNISTS and pundits who use The Devil’s Dictionary to debunk the stupidity and hypocrisy of politicians tend to forget that the man who wrote it, Ambrose Bierce, disappeared in 1913, on assignment to a country where politics was waged with guns, not snarky comments. A large part of PJ O’Rourke’s now rather weary schtick lies in exposing what a politician’s, or a fellow-journalist’s words “really” mean. To that end, he includes a longish glossary at the back of How The Hell Did This Happen?, packed with the cant that accompanied last year’s American presidential election. Needless to say, phrases are context-sensitive, meaning one thing if a Republican uses them, something else if a Democrat uses them. So, to a conservative the phrase “right-wing talk radio and Fox News” means “accurate and truthful reporting” while to a liberal it refers to “the voices people hear when they aren’t taking their meds”. And so on.
IT’S a great title for a poetry anthology. There’s a deliberate echo of Ezra Pound’s notion that literature is “news that stays news”, but it goes even further than that. We treasure poems about animals, I guess, because reading them is very much like wandering around a zoo and coming across species familiar but rarely seen up close or so unfamiliar and strange that we stop and stare. Whether caged in rhyme and metre or allowed to roam in open enclosures, poems represent a rich gathering-in of the natural world.
IF Colonel Gardner had not existed, it would not have been possible to invent him. He did a fairly good job of that himself, and where there were gaps, they were imaginatively filled by later biographers or crossly left blank by debunkers, who tended to think the whole thing was a clever sham. That he existed is not in doubt.
MY old maths tutor claimed that he could identify an Islay man on sight, simply from the way he walked. There was more malice than solidarity in this improbable skill. As a Muileach himself – born in Tobermory on the day the First World War began – he looked on the Ìleach with scorn, as representative of an inferior race. After a few peaty drams – and on this crucial matter he was inconsistent, conceding the Islay malts were among the masterworks of mankind – he would even demonstrate the supposed Islay gait, a kind of simian shuffle.
