Search results for ""Birlinn""

As an archaeologist, Steven Mithen has worked on the Hebridean island of Islay over a period of many years. In this book he introduces the sites and monuments and tells the story of the island’s people from the earliest stone age hunter-gatherers to those who lived in townships and in the grandeur of Islay House. He visits the tombs of Neolithic farmers, forts of Iron Age chiefs and castles of medieval warlords, discovers where Bronze Age gold was found, treacherous plots were made against the Scottish crown, and explores the island of today, which was forged more recently by those who mined for lead, grew flax, fished for herring and distilled whisky – the industry for which the island is best known today. Although an island history, this is far from an insular story: Islay has always been at a cultural crossroads, receiving a constant influx of new people and new ideas, making it a microcosm for the story of Scotland, Britain and beyond.

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Designed for those interested in the lore and tradition of a language, spoken until comparatively recently across much of Scotland, this is a compendium of Gaelic sayings and usage. The book includes notes, historical and social, and comparisons with sayings in different languages. Alexander Nicolson, one of the best scholars of his day, has gathered together a wide-ranging collection covering such diverse topics as women and marriage, wise men and fools, friendship and courage, and poverty and wealth. The proverbs appear in Gaelic along with the English translation, carefully preserving the pith of the original. These sayings, which as Nicolson remarks in his Preface, ’come from thatched cottages and not baronial and academic halls’, reflect keen intelligence and a distinct sense of humour. This is a comprehensive and important collection, with a foreword by Ian MacDonald of the Gaelic Books Council.

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This is an account of Rum, one of the Hebrides and the people who contributed to its story. The site of some of the earliest settlements in Scotland, Rum’s history extends back to the Mesolithic period. It was also an isolated haven for the early Celtic Church in the figure of Beccan the Solitary, and later formed part of the territories of the Vikings and Clanranalds, and ultimately the Macleans of Coll. Its population were driven out to North America between 1826 and 1828 and the Bulloughs, a family of Lancashire industrialists, bought the island towards the end of the nineteenth century and left a bizarre legacy of Edwardiana in the form of Kinloch castle and its grand contents. This work paints a picture of the island as a rich cultural and natural heritage that eminently justifies its status as one of Scotland’s finest nature reserves.

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Island Voices is a fascinating anthology of the tales and traditions of North Mull. The subjects throughout are timeless: local belief and superstition, pastimes, work, health and cures, tales and proverbs. Takes from a broad range of sources – both written and oral – it offers a penetrating and insightful view of the island experience, from Martin Martin in the seventeenth century to the end of the Second World War, a time which saw huge changes in Gaelic society as a whole. While many of the pieces show with devastating clarity how harsh island life has been over the centuries, they also illustrate the sharpness of phrase, shrewdness of observation and humour characteristic of the West Highlands and Islands. Island Voices is a celebration of a people who are often excluded from the standard historical accounts of the clans and Highlands, but who have endured much and safeguarded an important heritage.

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Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Football Book of the Year 2022 One of the Financial Times Top 5 Best Sports Books of the Year The 1970 World Cup is widely regarded as the greatest ever staged, with more goals per game than any World Cup since. But more than just the proliferation of goals was the quality of the overall football, as some of the finest teams ever to represent the likes of West Germany, Peru, Italy and England came together for a tilt at the world title. But at the heart of the tournament were Brazil; captained by Carlos Alberto and featuring legends like Pelé, Gérson, Jairzinho, Rivellino and Tostão, the 1970 Seleção are often cited as the greatest-ever World Cup team. Using brand new interviews alongside painstaking archival research, Andrew Downie charts each stage of the tournament, from the preparations to the final, telling a host of remarkable stories in the players’ own words. The result is an immediate, insightful and compelling narrative that paints a unique portrait of an extraordinary few weeks when football hit peaks it has seldom reached since. This is Mexico 1970. Welcome to the Greatest Show on Earth.

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The 1989 Tour de France is arguably the greatest ever. It saw American rider Greg LeMond overturn a 50-second deficit to France's Laurent Fignon on the final stage on the Champs Elysees to snatch the title by a mere eight seconds. After three weeks and more than 2,000 miles in the saddle, these few seconds remain the smallest margin of victory in the race's 100+ year history.But as dramatic as that Sunday afternoon on the streets of Paris was, the race wasn't just about that one time-trial. During the previous fortnight, the leader's yellow jersey had swapped back and forth between LeMond and Fignon in a titanic struggle for supremacy, a battle with more twists and turns than the maziest Alpine mountain pass. At no point during the entire three weeks were LeMond and Fignon separated by more than 53 seconds.In Three Weeks, Eight Seconds, Nige Tassell brings one of cycling's most astonishing stories to life, examining that extraordinary race in all its multi-faceted glory with fresh interviews and new perspectives and laying bare that towering heights of adrenaline, agony, excitement, torment and triumph that it produced.

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A Scots Quair is revolutionary - innovative in its form, deft and humorous in its use of the Scots language, courageous in its characterisation and politics. Central to the trilogy is Chris Guthrie, one of the most remarkable female characters in modern literature. In Sunset song, Gibbon's finest achievement, the reader follows Chris through her girlhood in a tight-knit Scottish farming community: the seasons, the weddings, the funerals, the grind of work, the gossip. As the Great War takes its toll, machines repalce the old way of life. Cloud Howe and Grey Granite take Chris from her rural homeland to life in an industrial Scotland and hte desperate years of the Depression. The triology as a whole is a major achievment, a picture of society undergoing traumatic and far-reaching transformation. Always readable, never sentimental, A Scots Quair is one of the most important works of Scottish literature.

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This major project of the European Ethnological research Centre is planned in thirteen volumes, plus this bibliography. Their overall aim is to examine the interlocking strands of history, language and traditional culture, in their international setting, that go into the making of a national identity. Though each volume tells a complete story in itself, and can stand on its own feet, the full role of Scottish Life and Society will become increasingly apparent as the volumes are published. It seeks to set a cultural benchmark for the beginning of a new millennium, which should be of value to educationists and to all who are interested in learning more about what had led up to the making of Scottish society as it is today.

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A remarkable debut from a promising new poet.In his debut collection, Real Boys, Thomas Stewart examines the death of his father and explores questions of grief, guilt, mental health, identity, sexuality and masculinity. As these poems unfold, a hallway of mirrors is created. Through the lens of father-son relationships, cinema, art and Welsh mythology are expanded and rethought. This collection grapples with what it means to be a father, a son and a self. Subverting the notions of gender, Stewart addresses both the damage of old stereotypes and the passage of generational trauma, questioning how we might change.''A wonderful meditation on the language of grief, want, lust and hope'' Jenni Fagan''A beautiful and wistful collection which wrangles with life's ample grief and heartache'' Andrés N. Ordorica''These poems are a revelation. I took great comfort from Thomas Stewart's collection'' Lotte Jeffs

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Hannah Lavery''sUnwritten Womanis a bold and lavish call for us to see the woman in the stories we read and tell ourselves.From her search for the story, in her home city, Edinburgh, through her chilling re-telling of Robert Louis Stevenson''s Jekyll & Hyde, elevating the women in that classic tale from being written between the lines, to the woman of colour, shouting from the sidelines of our cultural landscape.

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Shortlisted for The Winston Graham Historical Fiction Prize andThe Highland Book PrizeA battle lost. A daring escape. A long walk into obscurity. The ultimate failureIn the aftermath of the disastrous Battle of Culloden, a lonely figure takes flight with a small band of companions through the islands and mountains of the Hebrides. His name is Charles Edward Stuart: better known today as Bonnie Prince Charlie. He had come to the country to take the throne. Now he is leaving in exile and abject defeat.In prose that is by turns poetic, comic, macabre, haunting and humane, multi- award-winning author Alan Warner traces the frantic last journey through Scotland of a man who history will come to define for his failure.''Written in carefully crafted prose . . . this reimagining of Charles Edward Stuart's escape from Culloden is a triumph'' Stuart Kelly,The Scotsman

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This collected editon of Sorley MacLean brings together published poetry from MacLean's own edited volumes of poetry, poetry previously published in various magazines, literary journals and anthologies, and poetry which has never been published before. The poems are given in their original Gaelic with English translations. The volume opens with a biographical summary of Maclean's childhood on Raasay, his life at university and war experiences, and examines MacLean's effect on Gaelic and Scottish literature, and his literary, political and philosophical influences, which included Gaelic traditional song, Romanticism and Modernism, as well as Communism and Fascism.

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When BEATLEMANIA seized the nation: Relive the Mayhem of 1963 The Beatles broke up more than half a century ago, yet millions around the globe are still drawn to the legacy of four lads from Liverpool. It really shouldn't be like this. But, from the carefree innocence of 'A Hard Day's Night' to the experimental psychedelia of 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds', their message of love, peace and hope still resonates. In Shake It Up, Baby! we go back to the start - to 1963, when they went from playing to a handful of people in the remote Scottish Highlands to four number one singles, two number one albums, three UK tours and being besieged by thousands of fans at gigs all over Britain. Ken McNab tells the story through gripping, exclusive eye-witness accounts from those who were there: the Beatlemaniacs, the journalists, broadcasters and TV producers who were scrambling to make sense of it all, and the other bands who could only watch in awe as The Beatles went from bottom of the bill to headline act to biggest band on the planet.

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The Reich will protect its secrets. 1942, Berlin. After Police Chief Investigator Rolf Schneider is summoned to a meeting with Himmler and tasked with investigating the assassination of Heydrich, he exposes a web of corruption and secrecy involving the highest-ranking figures in the Reich. Schneider is faced with an agonising dilemma, for the secret he discovers is both the only thing that can save his life and what will mark him down for certain death. His choice propels him into a desperate race against the clock, one in which he must travel to the very heart of darkness. Based around real World War II events. For fans of Philip Kerr, Robert Harris and Volker Kutscher.

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London, 1943. Across the city prominent figures in science and the military are bursting into flame and being incinerated. Convinced that the Germans have deployed a new terror weapon, a desperate government turns to the one man who can track down the source of this dreadful menace - Sherlock Holmes. The quest for a solution drives Holmes into an uneasy alliance with the country’s most brilliant scientific genius, Professor James Moriarty. Only Holmes knows that, behind his façade of respectability, Moriarty is the mastermind behind a vast criminal empire. As they pursue the trail of incendiary murders, Holmes is quite sure that the professor is playing a double game and that there lies ahead a duel to the death which they cannot both survive. A tribute to the classic Universal Pictures Sherlock Holmes film series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.

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In Pianos and Flowers we are invited to glimpse a world long departed. In these stories, inspired by long-lost photographs, the lives of the people in the frame are imagined and then explored, layer by layer. Three sisters brought up in Penang, caught in the tide of war. A group of small boys in a Glasgow slum – their childhood blighted by poverty, their adult lives taking very different paths. A young woman’s search for love in the unlikely realm of Egyptian antiquities. And through all of these photographs, and all of these stories, there runs the same refrain: the possibilities of love, of friendship, of happiness lie before us.

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Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature Elemental, fierce and full of wonder, the Cairngorm mountains are the high and rocky heart of Scotland. To know them would take forever, to love them demands a kind of courageous surrender. In The Hidden Fires, Merryn Glover undertakes that challenge with Nan Shepherd as companion and guiding light. Following in the footsteps and contours of The Living Mountain, she explores the same landscapes and themes as Shepherd’s seminal work. This is a journey separated by time but unified by space and purpose, a conversation between two women across nearly a century that explores how entering the life of a mountain can illuminate our own. An Australian who grew up in the Himalayas, her early experiences of the Scottish hills and weather left her cold. But gradually acclimatising and with an approach like Shepherd’s, that is more mountain wandering than mountaineering, she discovers the spark that sets the hills and herself on fire. Through Glover’s deepening encounter, the wild majesty and iridescence of the Cairngorms is revealed in this beautiful evocation of landscape, place and identity. Shortlisted for The Great Outdoors Reader Awards 2024 'Merryn Glover’s The Hidden Fires is not just brave, it is remarkable' – Sir John Lister-Kaye

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'A celebration of the city and its enduring love affair with music and musicians, venues and shops, one which will spark the remembrance of unique, high-octane experiences for all of us' – Ian Rankin Discover Edinburgh’s hidden music heritage with this eye-opening guide to the city’s musical milestones, famous gigs, infamous incidents and colourful characters. From folk to funk, pop to punk, this compilation of bite-sized stories shines a light on the key people, venues and gigs that have shaped the city’s music scene. From Bowie to the Bay City Rollers, Edinburgh’s Greatest Hits touches on the big names as well as revealing some lesser-known legends and tall tales. Jim Byers, Fiona Shepherd, Alison Stroak and Jonathan Trew share decades of music fandom and journalism between them and are uniquely placed to explore the capital’s music scene, past and present.

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The Jacobite army marches into England and Alistair Maclean, close confident of Charles Edward Stewart embarks on a secret mission to raise support for the cause in the west. He soon begins to suspect someone close to the Prince is passing information to the Government, but just as he closes in on the traitor his own life is put in danger. Who is the turncoat and can Maclean save his own life and his Prince? Regarded by many critics as one of the finest historical novels ever written, Midwinter is a classic tale of intrigue, treachery and suspense. With an introduction by Stuart Kelly. This edition is authorised by the John Buchan Society.

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A poem does not have to be famous to be cherished. The best-known poems of Robert Burns have been loved by countless people over the years, but there are other poems that may be largely unknown that will mean a great deal to the few who are familiar with them. This anthology is a personal curation and not just a simple collection of poems. Each poem, handpicked by Alexander McCall Smith, leads the reader from one poem to the another. Intimate in tone, the editor shares the pleasure he finds in these poems through short epigraphs written for each piece.

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Almost eighteen years in the making, this collection is a love poem to a rural community in Scotland. The freshness of its language brings the daily grind, its joys and harsh realities, to vivid life; its final elegies form a moving testament to a lost generation of family, friends, farmers and farms.

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Bestowed at birth with two gifts, an ivory flute and a bag of silver and gold coins, a young girl wanders through time. She is destined to pursue the dragon of war and before he consumes the world in flames, subdue him not with violence but music. Moving across the battlefields from East to West, the girl bears witness to the suffering and brutality of war throughout history ...

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In 1969, among Harlem’s Rabelaisian cast of characters are bandleader King Curtis, soul singers Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway, and drug peddler Jimmy ‘Goldfinger’ Terrell. In February a raid on tenements across New York leads to the arrest of 21 Black Panther party members and one of the most controversial trials of the era. In the summer Harlem plays host to Black Woodstock and concerts starring Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone. The world’s most famous guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, a major supporter of the Black Panthers, returns to Harlem in support of their cause. By the end of the year Harlem is gripped by a heroin pandemic and the death of a 12-year-old child sends shockwaves through the USA, leaving Harlem stigmatised as an area ravaged by crime, gangsters and a darkly vengeful drug problem.

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This book is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century. This colourful, personal, anecdotal, indiscreet and admiring memoir charts the course of Muriel Spark’s life revealing her as she really was. Once, she commented sitting over a glass of chianti at the kitchen table, that she was upset that the academic whom she had appointed her official biographer did not appear to think that she had ever cracked a joke in her life. Alan Taylor here sets the record straight about this and many other things. With sources ranging from notebooks kept from his very first encounter with Muriel and the hundreds of letters they exchanged over the years, this is an invaluable portrait of one of Edinburgh’s premiere novelists. The book was published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Muriel’s birth in 2018.

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A verse novella by Glasgow Laureate Jim Carruth, Killochries tracks the relationship of two very different men working a remote farm over the course of twelve months. A young man is sent to work at Killochries, a farm belonging to a relative, after burning out in the city. He is appalled by the absence of his previous life’s essentials, by the remote strangeness of this new world. The old shepherd has never left the hills; has farmed them all his life. He doesn’t care for the troubles of the modern world, trusting only in God, and greets the incomer with taciturn indifference. Through weeks shaped by conflict, hardship and loss a new understanding grows.

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WINNER OF THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZE 2018 In the 1950s and 1960s, Memphis, Tennessee, was the launch pad of musical pioneers such as Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Al Green and Isaac Hayes, and by 1968 was a city synonymous with soul music. It was a deeply segregated city, ill at ease with the modern world and yet to adjust to the era of civil rights and racial integration. Stax Records offered an escape from the turmoil of the real world for many soul and blues musicians, with much of the music created there becoming the soundtrack to the civil rights movements. The book opens with the death of the city’s most famous recording artist, Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash in the final days of 1967, and then follows the fortunes of Redding’s label, Stax/Volt Records, as its fortunes fall and rise again. But, as the tense year unfolds, the city dominates world headlines for the worst of reasons: the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

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When the body of a retired sheriff is discovered in his grand house in the New Town of Edinburgh, Detective Sergeant Alice Rice finds herself hunting his killer. The search leads her to an unfamiliar world where wind-farm developers – with millions of pounds at stake – and protesters face each other with daggers drawn. Just as Alice thinks an answer is beginning to emerge, the sheriff’s lover is killed in an apparent hit-and-run accident. An unlikely coincidence or, as the search widens, is Alice now investigating a double murder?

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Journey through the imagined islands of history. Gathered in this book are over twenty islands that have decidedly human origins, whether they are the products of imagination, deception or simply human error. They are phantoms, fakes and legends: an archipelago of ex-isles and forgotten lands. From the well-known story of Atlantis to more obscure tales from around the globe, from the islands of pure fiction to others whose existence are still in question, Malachy has created an atlas of fairytale and wonder. Beautifully illustrated throughout with original full-colour maps.

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When a senior Edinburgh Civil Servant spectacularly takes his own life in Kinloch Harbour, D.C.I. Jim Daley comes face-to-face with the murky world of politics. To add to his woes, two local drug dealers lie dead, ritually assassinated. It's clear that dark forces are at work in the town. With his boss under investigation, his marriage hanging on by a thread, and his sidekick wrestling with his own demons, Daley's world is in meltdown. When strange lights appear in the sky over Kinloch, it becomes clear that the townsfolk are not the only people at risk. The fate of nations is at stake. Jim Daley must face his worst fears as tragedy strikes. This is not just about a successful investigation, it’s about survival.

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Julia Win, a successful Manhattan lawyer, is at a crossroads in her life. Despite her wealth and privilege, she is exhausted and unhappy – a lost soul. She returns to Burma, the homeland of her father, where she encounters an anguished mother whose life is shattered when her two sons are called up from their rural village to fight in Burma’s civil war. Both women embark on their own journeys of self-discovery, experiencing heartbreak, horror, love and, ultimately, redemption. This mesmerising novel explores the most inspiring and passionate terrain of all: the human heart.

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After distinguished service in the First World War, Richard Hannay settles into peaceful domesticity with his wife Mary and their young son. However, news comes to him of three kidnappings. With no more than a few tantalisingly cryptic lines of verse as clues, he is soon on the trail of Dominick Medina – a charismatic polymath but a man ‘utterly and consumedly wicked’. As Hannay uncovers an international plot to twist innocent minds through hypnotism and blackmail, it appears that he has met his match in one of Buchan’s most memorable villains. With an introduction by Christopher Hitchens. This edition is authorised by the John Buchan Society.

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Columba And All That is a real-life adventure packed with historical facts about the legendary Celtic saint. Join Columba as he leaves his home in Ireland for the undiscovered country of Scotland. Witness magic and miracles as Columba confronts the Loch Ness Monster and mysterious painted warriors. Packed with fantastic illustrations, Columba And All That is one man's epic quest to spread the Word of God in a strange land - and hoping the natives like what they hear! Aimed at children aged 8-12. Discover the difference between Christians and Pagans Find out how to make a Columban boat from animal skins Explore Columba's monastery at Iona Uncover Columba's dark secrets

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WINNER OF THE SALTIRE SOCIETY HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEARNext morning at about 6 o'clock my mother wakened us to say there had been a shipwreck and bodies were being washed ashore. My fatherhad gone with others to look for survivors ... I don't think any survivors came in at Port Ellen but bodies did.The loss of two British ships crammed with American soldiers bound for the trenches of the First World War brought the devastation of war directly to the shores of the Scottish island of Islay.The sinking of the troopship Tuscania by a German U-Boat on 5 February 1918 was the first major loss of US troops in in the war. Eight months after the people of Islay had buried more than 200 Tuscania dead, the armed merchant cruiser Otranto collided with another troopship during a terrible storm. Despite a valiant rescue attempt by HMS Mounsay, the Otranto drifted towards Islay, hit a reef, throwing 600 men into the water. Just 19 survived; the rest were drowned or crushed by the wreckage.Based on the

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On 31 December 1918, His Majesty''s Yacht Iolaire sailed from Kyle of Lochalsh for Stornoway, bearing home to the Hebrides nearly 300 naval veterans of the Great War.She never made it. At two in the morning, the ship ran aground by the mouth of Stornoway harbour, and over 200 men drowned in what remains Britain''s biggest peacetime disaster at sea since the loss of the Titanic - devastating the Isle of Lewis and scarring a generation.Acclaimed journalist John MacLeod examines the events of that dreadful night and uncovers a story not only of official incompetence, error and neglect but also of individual heroism, and the resilience and faith of a remarkable people.

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The infamous Beeching Axe' swept away virtually every Scottish branch line in the 1960s. Conventional wisdom viewed these losses as regrettable yet inevitable in an era of growing affluence and rising car ownership.This ground-breaking study of Dr Beeching's approach to closures has unearthed from rarely or never previously referenced archive sources strong evidence of a stitch-up', ignoring the scope for sensible economies and improvements which would have allowed a significant number of axed routes to survive and prosper. Acclaimed railway historian David Spaven traces the birth, life and eventual death of Scotland's branch lines through the unique stories of how a dozen routes lost their trains in the 1960s: the lines to Ballachulish, Ballater, Callander, Crail, Crieff /Comrie, Fraserburgh, Kelso, Kilmacolm, Leven, Peebles, Peterhead and St Andrews.He concludes by exploring a potential renaissance of branch lines, propelled by concerns over road congestion, vehicle pollution and t

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In April 1923 the SS Metagama weighed anchor off Stornoway and set sail for Montreal. On board were three hundred young men and women bound for a new life in North America. Partly driven by the lure of opportunities overseas, these young Leosachs were also participants in the new government programme of state-aided emigration. Based on personal interviews with those who travelled to the New World on the Metagama and other ships, Jim Wilkie sets their story in the context of emigration in Lewis over the centuries, to produce a fascinating insight into one of the central events in the island’s history.

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Winner of Saltire Scottish History Book of the Year They would be better dead, they said, than set adrift upon the world. But set adrift they were - thousands of them, their communities destroyed, their homes demolished and burned. Such were the Sutherland Clearances, an extraordinary episode, involving the deliberate depopulation of much of a Scottish county. What was done in the course of that episode was planned and carried out by a small group of men and one woman. Most of those involved wrote a great deal about their actions, intentions and feelings, and much of it has been preserved. There are no equivalent collections of material from those whose communities ceased to exist. Their feelings and fears are harder to access, but they are by no means irrecoverable. In this book James Hunter tells the story of the Sutherland Clearances. His researches took him to archives in Scotland, England and Canada, to the now deserted straths of Sutherland, to the frozen shores of Hudson Bay. The result is a gripping, moving, definitive account of a people's struggle for survival in the face of tragedy and disaster which includes experiences which have not featured in any previous such account.

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In this evocative book Iain and Anne Fraser take the reader, both visitor and resident, on a personal journey through the centre of one of the world's most unforgettable cities. Working with four talented local artists (Irina Cucu, Cat Outram, Keli Clark and Catherine Stevenson) they reflect the character and cultural history of Edinburgh through 80 pages and 150 beautiful and original illustrations.Their narrative describes the split personality of Scotland's capital city, from the subdued sophistication of a dreich' February day to the flouncy and frivolous fun of the summer festival season. The dramatic character of Edinburgh and its history are world renowned. The authors highlight their favourite parts of the city centre and include a series of quirky stories discovered during their research gleaned from some of the many books written about the city.''Iain and Anne are just the guides you need for this tour. Their love for this city and their knowledge of its moods shine through .

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Scottish produce is celebrated the world over. The demand for game, for example, far exceeds what can be supplied, and Scottish cheeses surpass many from mainland Europe. In this book Claire Macdonald celebrates the very best of home-grown ingredients - from oatmeal, dairy produce, meat and fish, fruit and vegetables and even whisky - in 60 imaginative recipes for starters, main course and puddings, as well as for sauces, dressings, baking and other treats.Recipes include: Grilled goat''s cheese on stir-fried beetroot with orange and Balsamic vinegar Chocolate oatmeal biscuits Iced honey and whisky creams Herb crepes with smoked salmon, creme fraiche and diced cucumber Steam-baked cod with lentils, coriander and lime Venison fillet with green peppercorn, ginger and port sauce

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Nichola Fletcher has been a key champion of venison for over four decades and was awarded an MBE for services to the venison industry.In this book she gives fail-safe instructions for the different cooking methods (grilling, frying, roasting and slow-cooking) as well as discussing wild, farmed, red, fallow, roe and muntjac deer. Over 40 recipes show the enormous versatility of this low-fat meat, contrasting the traditional with exciting contemporary dishes like venison steaks with lime, fennel and honey, or Thai-spiced venison casserole. A much-requested section on what to serve with venison completes this imaginative introduction to one of the UK''s most popular speciality meats.

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Scotland''s National dish is the source of endless jokes and horror stories, yet continues to provoke curiosity around the world. With an ancient history and an eight-verse tribute penned by Robert Burns, haggis is a Scottish cultural icon. So how did it come to acquire its bad boy image and earn such mixed reviews, ranging from the devotion of its fans to the deep revulsion of the uninitiated?In this informative and light-hearted book, Jo Macsween of the famous family of Edinburgh haggis makers, expertly guides you through the myths and magic to a new realm of haggis appreciation that transcends neeps, tatties and Burns Night. Featuring fifty mouth-watering recipes, Jo rewrites the rules and demonstrates that haggis is a versatile ingredient that can be savoured at all times of day and throughout the year. She even dares to challenge the long-standing association of haggis with whisky, and recommends a new coterie of drinking companions.

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The classic Glasgow Memoir with a new introduction by Tom MortonThis is Clifford Hanley's vibrant, unsentimental and hilarious account of growing up in the 1920s and 30s, and his later working life as a radio broadcaster and journalist.His razor-sharp observations and anecdotes cover many topics, from family life, art and showbiz to politics, sex, TB and what it was like to be a conscientious objector during the Second World War. But even the most bittersweet stories are leavened with humour, and the irrepressible Glasgow spirit always shines through.''Hanley writes with consistent relish for his native city . . . captures Glasgow and its people nonchalantly and unfussily'' Ian Jack, The Guardian''Like a portal into a vanished Glasgow, but one where the city, its people their foibles, hopes, humour and warmth are instantly familiar'' Norry Wilson, Lost Glasgow

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Pebble the pony lives on a wild and lonely moor. He loves the holidaymakers who come up from the ton especially when they bring picnics and feed him their leftovers!One day, Pebble makes up his mind to see the town for himself, but when he gets there, he finds it's not such a wonderful place after all. He is rescued by an old lady, Miss Moss, who leads him safely back to the moor.Pebble often visits Miss Moss on her little farm and is a great help to her when she is unable to go shopping in the town. They soon become the best of friends.

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Acclaimed historian Alistair Moffat sets off in the footsteps of the Highland clans and their definitive conflicts. In twelve journeys he explores places of conflict, recreating as he walks the tumult of battle. As he recounts the military prowess of the clans he also tells of their lives, their language and culture before it was all swept away.From the colonisers who attempted to civilise' the islanders of Lewis in the sixteenth century through the great battles of the eighteenth century Killiekrankie, Dunkeld, Sheriffmuir, Falkirk and Culloden this is a unique exploration of many of the places and events which define the country's history. The disaster at Culloden in 1746 represented not just the defeat of the Jacobite dream but also the unleashing of merciless retribution from the British government which dealt the Highland clans a blow from which they would never recover.Locations included are:PrestonpansGlenfinnan The Isle of Lewis Edinburgh Inverlochy Tippermuir Mulroy Killiecr

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The Scots have always had a reputation for clarity of thought and also for the vigour with which it is put into words.This collection spans the entire gamut of a nation''s recorded thought and experience from Roman Scotland to the present day. It covers a vast range of subject matter and demonstrates a remarkable variety of moods and tones, from the literary to the colloquial and bawdy. Packed with sharp observation and humour, it sounds other notes too. Meditative, triumphant, tragic, accusing, tender - and often hilarious - it reveals the spirit of Scotland in a truly unique way.

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This notebook features a beautiful illustration of the iconic heron in its natural habitat. With cover illustrations by fine art printmaker Sarah Ross Thompson, this notebook contains blank paper, with head-and-tail bands.

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For over three centuries, the inhabitants of North Britain faced the might of Rome, resulting in some of the most extraordinary archaeology of the ancient world. This richly illustrated new history of Roman Scotland explores the complex, often tumultuous and frequently brutal interaction between the world's first superpower and the peoples who lived north of Hadrian's Wall. With reference to the latest research and featuring all the key sites, it offers though-provoking re-assessments of many aspects of the story of the Romans in Scotland, from the loss of the IXth Legion and the reasons for building and maintaining Hadrian's Wall, to considering what spurred at least four Roman emperors to personally visit the edge of the empire.

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