Is there any such thing as a new idea? Bryony Coombs discusses similarities in artistic expression, centuries apart.
Highland landowners in the decades before and after 1800, and Scots associated with plantation slavery in the same period, have had a bad press. The view of many people of the Highland Clearances comes from John Prebble’s book. First published…
Glasgow is a city which has generated a massive literature of both fiction and non-fiction, including Irene Maver’s magisterial Glasgow, also published by Edinburgh University Press in 2000. Moira Burgess’s bibliography of the Glasgow novel has run to three editions.…
‘There is a lot of mythology about these events…’ (Sir Tom Devine The Times, 3 February 2018) …the deployment of the army to Glasgow in 1919. In November 2017 I needed to distract myself while sitting by my wife’s hospital…
‘The politics of this country will probably, for the next few years, mainly consist in an assault upon the constitutional position of the landed interest.’ Benjamin Disraeli So said the Conservative politician and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in the late…
One of the reasons for the devolution of the management of the Scottish Crown estate property to the Scottish government in April 2017 was because of the perception that the Crown Estate Commissioners in London focussed too narrowly on securing…
Glasgow Archaeological Society has been committed to publishing papers and disseminating information on archaeological findings and discoveries since it was founded in December 1856. The first part of what was to become the first volume of the Transactions of Glasgow…
What’s the artist for in modern Scotland? Curating our accumulated history? Envisioning our possible and impossible futures? Diagnosing the ills of our present and prescribing treatment for the body politic? Showing us who we are, or who we ought to…
My new book, Viking Law and Order, paints a rather different picture of Viking Age society from the one we are used to. We often hear discussions of violent raids and systematic pillaging by warriors arriving in long ships. It…
It would seem that elements of the Anglosphere have always required a bogey or a multiplicity of bogeys. Perhaps other spheres do too. It is certainly the case that the notion of coping with the feared evil ‘Other’ has also…