Stuart Dunmore discusses his motivations for researching new Gaelic speakers, and the incredible places and experiences this led to.
Scotland's National Librarian discusses the place of libraries in our cultural landscape.
by Paul Malgrati Every year, on 25 January, Burns Night offers a remarkable opportunity for Scottish political parties to issue a statement about the Scottish nation, its identity, and its situation. Last year, in 2022, Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon,…
It’s been fifteen years since the last fat volume of essays on contemporary Scottish writing. Only a blink of historical time, but it’s been quite an eventful period. When the chapters of Berthold Schoene’s brilliant Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature were being written, both the country and its debates looked rather different.
by Daniel Cook Still revered as one of the world’s great historical novelists, Sir Walter Scott kept coming back to the supernatural, the eerie, and the macabre. Some of the novels even include extractable tales of terror: ‘The Fortunes of…
By the Editors & Reviews Editor, the Burns Chronicle Almost 130 years ago, in 1892, enthusiasts started publishing the Burns Chronicle and the journal has continued ever since, conveying articles of interest and news among Burns Clubs and admirers of…
By James Bailey ‘I am a hoarder of two things: documents and trusted friends’, wrote Spark in her 1992 autobiography, Curriculum Vitae. ‘The former outweigh the latter in terms of quantity’, she added. Spark wasn’t exaggerating; while the author was…
‘How do you do it? I am dazzled’, enthused Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Muriel Spark in 1960. Spark’s latest novel, The Bachelors, was hot off the press, and this, Waugh told her, was ‘the cleverest and most elegant…
Gerard Lee McKeever’s new book Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786-1831 is published this month in the ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism’ series. To mark the occasion, Dr McKeever spoke to series co-editor Professor Penny Fielding.
Audrey Murfin explores Robert Louis Stevenson and his methods of Character Creation