Here are 95 books that The Democratic Intellect fans have personally recommended if you like
The Democratic Intellect.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Very little Scottish history or culture was taught in school when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. When I began to read books on the subject from the local library and then studied Scottish literature at Edinburgh University, I realised what my brother and sister Scots had missed out on, and was determined to rectify that by writing accessible books which would both inform and entertain as well as enrich their lives and change the way they perceived their culture. I love their reaction to my work and the influence my books have had.
In terms of Scottish political and cultural history, this is a hugely important book that will astonish and delight everyone engaged in the matter of Scotland. What impresses is the range and scope of Murray Pittock’s global vision for Scotland, but what engages is the minute human detail of the people in the diaspora that he reveals to us, positive and negative. This is the polar opposite of dry history, it is a magisterial work that Scots will actively return to again and again, as we redefine our role in Europe and the world in the 21st Century. I have interviewed Murray for several BBC programmes and he has always come across as a brilliant communicator, who like me, is passionate about Scotland.
An engaging and authoritative history of Scotland's influence in the world and the world's on Scotland, from the Thirty Years War to the present day
Scotland is one of the oldest nations in the world, yet by some it is hardly counted as a nation at all. Neither a colony of England nor a fully equal partner in the British union, Scotland's history has often been seen as simply a component part of British history. But the story of Scotland is one of innovation, exploration, resistance-and global consequence.
In this wide-ranging, deeply researched account, Murray Pittock examines the place of…
Very little Scottish history or culture was taught in school when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. When I began to read books on the subject from the local library and then studied Scottish literature at Edinburgh University, I realised what my brother and sister Scots had missed out on, and was determined to rectify that by writing accessible books which would both inform and entertain as well as enrich their lives and change the way they perceived their culture. I love their reaction to my work and the influence my books have had.
The British edition of this provocative book has the modest title The Scottish Enlightenment with the subheadingThe Scots’ Invention of theModern World. I have the original in-your-face American edition though, which rejoices in a title that no Scot would have the brass neck to come up with: How the Scots Invented the Modern World with the subheadingThe True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It.It was given to me by a Philipino-Californian surfing lawyer, Jesse Quinsaat, who studied with me at Edinburgh University in the early 1970s and continues his interest in Scottish culture when surf’s not up or the cases are not too demanding! He had bought the book in San Diego, loved it, and passed it on to me during a visit to Edinburgh.
'Every Scot should read it. Scotland now has the lively, provocative and positive history it deserves.' Irvine Welsh, Guardian
A dramatic and intriguing history of how Scotland produced the institutions, beliefs and human character that have made the West into the most powerful culture in the world.
Arthur Herman argues that Scotland's turbulent history, from William Wallace to the Presbyterian Lords of the Covenant, laid the foundations for 'the Scottish miracle'. Within one hundred years, the nation that began the eighteenth century dominated by the harsh and repressive Scottish Kirk had evolved into Europe's most literate society, producing an idea…
Very little Scottish history or culture was taught in school when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. When I began to read books on the subject from the local library and then studied Scottish literature at Edinburgh University, I realised what my brother and sister Scots had missed out on, and was determined to rectify that by writing accessible books which would both inform and entertain as well as enrich their lives and change the way they perceived their culture. I love their reaction to my work and the influence my books have had.
Coming from a wee country with a big global footprint, discovering this groundbreaking book gave me the idea of doing something similar for Scotland. Readable, engaging, and full of surprises, it is a great counterweight to the view that everything important in the world was produced by people from the great nation states.
The Basques are Europe's oldest people, their origins a mystery, their language related to no other on Earth, and even though few in population and from a remote and rugged corner of Spain and France, they have had a profound impact on the world. Whilst inward-looking, preserving their ancient language and customs, the Basques also struck out for new horizons, pioneers of whaling and cod fishing, leading the way in exploration of the Americas and Asia, were among the first capitalists and later led Southern Europe's industrial revolution.
Mark Kurlansky, the author of the acclaimed Cod, blends human stories with…
Very little Scottish history or culture was taught in school when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. When I began to read books on the subject from the local library and then studied Scottish literature at Edinburgh University, I realised what my brother and sister Scots had missed out on, and was determined to rectify that by writing accessible books which would both inform and entertain as well as enrich their lives and change the way they perceived their culture. I love their reaction to my work and the influence my books have had.
This is just one of several books by these brilliant academics who have done so much to make people aware of the huge Scottish presence in Europe and the incredible influence they had on their host nations. I use many stories gleaned from Steve in my own book.
Steve points out that while many Scots served in the Swedish army in the 17th century as professional soldiers, they were not merely content to be part of the military élite. Their penetration into the exclusive field of diplomacy is revealed by the negotiations between Sweden and Denmark-Norway to end the Kalmar War in 1613. Representing the Danish side was Robert Anstruther, on the Swedish side was James Spens. No only were they both Scots, they were half-brithers from the East Neuk of Fife! They did quite literally ken each ither’s faither!
Migration is a fundamental feature of human experience. This extraordinary collection of essays focuses on a particularly intriguing sequence of migrations: those of Scots during the period 1600-1800. As Professor T.C. Smout says in his Foreword, "The present volume is a breakthrough, surely the biggest advance in the field for a hundred years."
I fell in love with Romantic poetry when I was young. Then, after a gap of several years, I began to write historical fiction, and it was at this time that I found myself being drawn once more to the Romantic poets, this time as people as much as for their work. I discovered their place in the world, contested and controversial, and their influence became a driving light to me and my characters. InBeneath Black Clouds and White, Delphi explains: “It has a pulse, you see, like any other living thing. You must treat each poem as though it were alive.” I feel the same way!
I’m a person with limited interests so, as well as loving history and poetry, I also collect bits of both… Ballads and Lyrical Pieces is one of the only books I can boast about having a first edition of!
I have a lot of time for Walter Scott, not only as a writer, but as a cultural politician and a folklorist. A lot of the pieces in this book are not solely his work, but the reimagining of local ballads. After scooping up these, there’s no wonder he went on to invent the romanticised “Scottishness” we recognise today. This book, 15 years before Scott influenced George IV’s visit to Scotland, shows where his own influences came from.
Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure…
I am the author of sixteen novels—six of them set in the mid-seventeenth century. The English Civil Wars and their aftermath is a period very close to my heart—combining as it does fascinating personalities, incredibly complicated politics, and all the drama and bloodshed of civil conflict. My greatest pleasure has been finding and featuring real men whose names are now largely forgotten.
I read a lot of biographies but this one stands head and shoulders above the rest. Told with a novelist’s eye, Hastings gives a compelling account of a remarkable man, his achievements, and his tragic, utterly disgraceful end.
Travel with Montrose and his band of ill-equipped Irishmen over the Grampians in the dead of winter—it’s a journey one doesn’t forget.
Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Very Good, FIRST EDITION. VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD. LONDON. 1977 A very good/fine copy in black cloth boards, gold-gilt title on spine, illustrated endpapers, with a very good/fine dust-jacket in a clear protective wrapper.
I played rugby union for Durham University and at Rosslyn Park FC in London. Then I became a reporter and editor, for Rugby News magazine and on Fleet Street sports desks. In March 2002, six months after 9/11 and a year before the invasion of Iraq, my Park team played against the cadets of the United States Military Academy. Years later, settled in New York, I decided to find out what happened to those West Point rugby players in the 9/11 wars, and what their experiences might tell us about sports, war, brotherhood, loss, and remembrance.
Tom English has produced a series of oral histories (latterly with Peter Burns) which any fan would be advised to read.
The Grudge tells the story of Scotland v England 1990, a game for the Five Nations title that stood for so much more: politics, nationalism, class warfare. It’s a glorious re-telling of an epic game, an upset Scotland win. But I love it for its portrayal of respect between players, of warriors bound by the violent game they play, of friendships across the lines of battle.
Brian Moore emerges a hero: the fearsome “Pitbull” of the England pack, yet a man who fronted up and went drinking with Scots after a crushing defeat. That, to me, is the true spirit of rugby, and the brotherhood it inspires.
Murrayfield, the Calcutta Cup, March 1990. England vs. Scotland - winner-takes-all for the Five Nations Grand Slam, the biggest prize in northern hemisphere rugby. Will Carling's England are the very embodiment of Margaret Thatcher's Britain - snarling, brutish and all-conquering. Scotland are the underdogs - second-class citizens from a land that's become the testing ground for the most unpopular tax in living memory: Thatcher's Poll Tax. In Edinburgh, nationalism is rising high - what happens in the stadium will resound far beyond the pitch.
The Grudge brilliantly recaptures a day that has gone down in history when a rugby match…
Scotland’s greatest poet since Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid, said that there were no traditions in writing, only precedents. He was thinking that, were traditions followed, adhered to, applauded, and praised, and prized too highly, then the danger of slavish repetition rather than creative divergence was too high. We need the mad moments, when all bets are off and something truly unpredictable will happen. I write with Scots modernist, postmodernist, and experimental precedents in mind. I want there to be Scots literature that reflects a divergent, creative nation, willing to experiment with words and life, and, in Alasdair Gray’s formulation, “work as though in the early days of a better nation.”
A Trocchi renaissance, including a film of Young Adam starring A-Listers Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, and Emily Mortimer, added to a growing reappraisal of Trocchi as a great Scottish writer, his reputation having been tarnished, fairly or unfairly, with drug use, indolence, and writer’s block.
Young Adam is a Scots crime novel the way James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a high-jinx picaresque, which is to say only technically, and on the understanding that Hogg and Trocchi sit head, shoulders and in fact a full body length above these genres. But moment of madness there is, and arrest, trial, judgment, and condemnation. But the twist is that Trocchi’s own judgment and condemnation of society is what matters.
Set on a canal linking Glasgow and Edinburgh, Young Adam is the masterly literary debut by one of the most important British post-war novelists. Trocchi's narrator is an outsider, a drifter working for the skipper of a barge. Together they discover a young woman's corpse floating in the canal, and tensions increase further in cramped confines with the narrator's highly charged seduction of the skipper's wife. Conventional morality and the objective meaning of events are stripped away in a work that proves compulsively readable.
I’m a historian who is endlessly curious about the past lives of the things that I love. My fondness for wine began when I lived in Paris after finishing my PhD, and it deepened when I taught in Cambridge and sampled my college’s vast cellar. My first books were on imperial history and this perspective made me wonder: was it a coincidence that New World wine producers are former European colonies? I spent a decade researching Imperial Wine, consulting archives in five countries, and proved that wine was an arm of colonial strategy. I’m a Professor of History at Trinity College in Connecticut, USA, and I love teaching wine and history.
Ludington’s book is exciting because it disproves pervasive ideas about wine consumption. One of the big assumptions in the history of commodities is that middle-class people want to imitate elites, and that taste trickles down the social ladder.
Ludington shows that the opposite was true 250 years ago in England and Scotland: aristocrats started changing their wine-buying habits to appear more sympathetic to the middling sort. This trickle-up is an eighteenth-century equivalent of affluent hipsters drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon or fashionistas buying $400 jeans.
I’m the type of reader who finishes each sentence thinking yeah, but how do we know that?, so I find Ludington’s generous footnotes and detailed cellar inventories to be deeply satisfying. This is not an easy read, but it’s a thoroughly enriching one.
A unique look at the meaning of the taste for wine in Britain, from the establishment of a Commonwealth in 1649 to the Commercial Treaty between Britain and France in 1860 - this book provides an extraordinary window into the politics and culture of England and Scotland just as they were becoming the powerful British state.
For almost thirty years, I worked as a cop in the back alleys, poorly lit laneways, and forgotten neighbourhoods in Toronto, the city where I grew up. Murder, mayhem, and sexual violations intended to demean, shame, and haunt the victims were all in a day’s work. Whether as a beat cop or a plainclothes detective, I dealt with good people who did bad things and bad people who followed their instincts. And now that I’m retired, I can take some of those experiences and turn them into crime fiction novels.
Having personally investigated numerous missing persons cases (not all of which ended well), I was drawn to this book and identified with DI Rebus’ frustrations with the police bureaucracy. The inner demons that are the cornerstone of the Rebus character make for a wonderfully flawed protagonist and one exceptionally good read.
The twelfth Inspector Rebus bestseller - a powerfully gripping novel where past and present collide... From the No.1 bestselling author of A SONG FOR THE DARK TIMES
'This is, quite simply, crime writing of the highest order' DAILY EXPRESS
'The unopposed champion of the British police procedural' GUARDIAN
A student has gone missing in Edinburgh. She's not just any student, though, but the daughter of well-to-do and influential bankers. There's almost nothing to go on until DI John Rebus gets an unmistakable gut feeling that there's more to this than just another runaway spaced out on unaccustomed freedom.
