• Photograph showing a page from a medieval manuscript.

Frederick Douglass and Ten Scottish Worthies

Recent research has suggested that Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was the most photographed American of the nineteenth century.  The former slave who became a leading intellectual and civil rights campaigner of his age, was captured on camera more times than George…

Blackhill

A Social History of Glasgow Council Housing

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.…

The deployment of the army to Glasgow in 1919

‘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…

Hamish Henderson

Hamish Henderson and our Historical Moment

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…

Viking Law and Order

Viking Law and Order

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…