Every country suffers from stereotypes, few more than Scotland. Since the nineteenth century, if not earlier, we—and the rest of the world—have built a fantasy history of romantic kilted highlanders, misty glens, and Celtic romance which bears very little relationship to the much richer, much more complex reality of Scotland's past. As a writer and scholar one of my goals has been to explore that past and to dispel—or at least explain—the myths which still obscure it. I live in a small fishing village on the east coast of the country. There are very few kilts and no misty glens.
I wrote...
The First Scottish Enlightenment: Rebels, Priests, and History
Most people have a vague idea that there was something called "the Scottish Enlightenment," some sort of period towards the end of the eighteenth century when Edinburgh became one of the intellectual centres of Europe and everything from modern economics to history to philosophy was forged within its walls. This book is about what came before that, about the rebels, priests, and—yes—rebel priests who transformed Scottish culture between the 1680s and the 1740s, rewriting both the nation's past and its present despite coming from religious and political minorities which saw increasing persecution by the establishment. It offers a dramatically different reading of Scottish history and challenges many of the narratives about that history which are still current today.
Start with these. Distilling a lifetime's reading, these four pocket-sized volumes are a quilt of short extracts from contemporary texts written by and about Scots from the middle ages to 1802. Introduced and commented on with distinctly interwar charm and wit, they paint the single most vivid picture of realScottish life I've ever read. I picked up the first two volumes from the shelves of a retiring colleague and immediately ran to buy the others—you're in for a treat.
A bracing tonic for anyone slogging through the Outlander—or Waverley—version of the Jacobite rebellions, Jacob's 1911 novel is beautiful, painful, and utterly unromantic (even though the deep attraction felt between the two main male characters is the driving force of much of the plot). It throws into sharp relief the ambiguities of civil war and the ways in which personal background, inclination, and affection play more of a role than principle ever could in determining an individual's place in such a conflict. Each year, my students are continually surprised by how much they enjoy it.
'I think it is the best Scots romance since The Master of Ballantrae,' said John Buchan when Flemington was first published in 1911. Violet Jacob's fifth and finest novel is a tragic drama of the 1745 Jacobite Rising, tightly written, poetic in its symbolic intensity, lit by flashes of humour and informed by the author's own family history as one of the Erskines of the House of Dun near Montrose.
Drawn back to these roots in her later years, Violet Jacob also wrote many unforgettable short stories about the people, the landscapes and the language of the North-east. In this…
A forgotten gem of a book. Katherine Parker hasn't (yet) enjoyed the same revival of interest as Violet Jacob, but this volume alone should make us reconsider. Sitting somewhere between biography and novel, it teases us and makes us a little uncomfortable as it veers between fragments of dialogue—clearly invented, albeit very much in keeping with period language—and more obviously historical passages, telling the eventful life of Jean Cochrane, Viscountess Dundee (1662-1695) from her birth in the west of Scotland, through her marriage with the famous Jacobite general Viscount Dundee—"Bloody Clavers" or "Bonnie Dundee" depending on your political preferences—to her strange death, killed by a collapsing inn roof in Utrecht, and her stranger exhumation a hundred years later.
Surviving in a single manuscript, printed once in 1844, and forgotten almost instantly, the Breiffe Narration is, without doubt, one of the masterpieces of Scottish prose. It is the autobiography, partial in more ways than one, of Father Gilbert Blackhall (d. 1671), a soldier turned Catholic priest from Aberdeenshire who was the confessor to three leading noblewomen during the tumultuous period of the civil wars. Blackhall evades robbers, rescues his noble charges from dastardly plots, and travels halfway across Europe in a first-person narrative written in a rich, broad Scots and full of vivid dialogue (presumably more invented than remembered, but splendid for all that). My copy has almost been read to pieces.
Leather Binding on Spine and Corners with Golden Leaf Printing on round Spine (extra customization on request like complete leather, Golden Screen printing in Front, Color Leather, Colored book etc.) Reprinted in 2019 with the help of original edition published long back [1844]. This book is printed in black & white, sewing binding for longer life, Printed on high quality Paper, re-sized as per Current standards, professionally processed without changing its contents. As these are old books, we processed each page manually and make them readable but in some cases some pages which are blur or missing or black spots.…
What is the dividing line between genius and madness? The question is a pressing one when you face Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (1611-1660), duelist, soldier, mathematician, genealogist, linguist, poet, historian, metaphysician, cryptographer, and endless self-promoter. It is said that Urquhart invented as many words as Shakespeare. The difference? Shakespeare's neologisms caught on, while "disobstetricate," "enixibility," and "scripturiency" remain firmly outside the dictionaries. If you're feeling brave, though, Urquhart's Discovery of a Most Exquisite Jewel More Precious Than Diamonds Inchased with Gold, The Like Whereof Was Never Seen in Any Age(he means his own writing) is one of the richest, maddest, most compelling narratives of a Scot trying to find himself and his country in the war-torn seventeenth century.
Adventures in the Radio Trade documents a life in radio, largely at Canada's public broadcaster. It's for people who love CBC Radio, those interested in the history of Canadian Broadcasting, and those who want to hear about close encounters with numerous luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, J. Michael Straczynski, Stuart McLean, Joni Mitchell, Peter Gzowski, and more. And it's for people who want to know how to make radio.
Crafted with gentle humour and thoughtfulness, this is more than just a glimpse into the internal workings of CBC Radio. It's also a prose ode to the people and shows that make CBC Radio great.
"In dozens of amiable, frequently humorous vignettes... Mahoney fondly recalls his career as a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio technician in this memoir... amusing and highly informative." — Kirkus Reviews
"What a wonderful book! If you love CBC Radio, you'll love Adventures in the Radio Trade. Joe Mahoney's honest, wise, and funny stories from his three decades in broadcasting make for absolutely delightful reading! — Robert J. Sawyer, author of The Oppenheimer Alternative''
"No other book makes me love the CBC more." — Gary Dunford, Page Six *** Adventures in the Radio Trade documents a life in radio, largely at Canada's…
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