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The Complete Scottish Sketches of R. B. Cunninghame Graham
Read more: The Complete Scottish Sketches of R. B. Cunninghame GrahamCunninghame Graham's great-grandnephew reveals his favourite sketch of the celebrated Scottish writer
Enlightenment in a Smart City: Edinburgh’s Civic Development, 1660-1750
By Murray Pittock My book is a study of the Enlightenment in Edinburgh like no other. Using data and models provided by urban innovation and Smart City theory, it pinpoints the distinctive features that made Enlightenment in the Scottish capital possible.…
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…
Lord Seaforth: Highland proprietor in the age of the Clearances and plantation slave owner
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…
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.…
Investigating Scotland’s land issues, past, present and future
‘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…
It should not be ‘a matter of £ s d.’: The Crown estate, foreshore and the public interest
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…
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
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…
Celebrating 70 Years of the Edinburgh International Festival
An extract from The Edinburgh Festivals: Culture and Society in Post-war Britain by Angela Bartie On Sunday 24 August 1947, the first Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama opened with a service of praise in St Giles’ Cathedral, the…