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Non-Fiction

Featured image of Common Ground

Common Ground

“This little patch of ground was exactly that: common. And all the richer for it.” In a sense, this sentence summarises both the strengths and weaknesses of Common Ground. In particular, pragmatic people are likely to ask: “If it is so common, what warrants writing so extensively about it?” From a reductive perspective, one might Read More

Featured image of The Serengeti Rules: the quest to discover how life works and why it matters

The Serengeti Rules: the quest to discover how life works and why it matters

The Serengeti Rules is a an excellent book on ecology written by a molecular biologist, S B Carroll, in which he links mechanisms of control found at the molecular level with the factors determining the relative numbers of plants and animals living together in ecosystems.  The decisions of policy makers and funders over thirty years have Read More

Featured image of Set Adrift Upon the World: The Sutherland Clearances

Set Adrift Upon the World: The Sutherland Clearances

The Sutherland Clearances continue to provoke controversy, particularly the notion of “Improvement” and the causes of migration, and there are inherent difficulties where most of the primary sources emanate from the Establishment. In Set Adrift Upon the World, Hunter, Emeritus Professor of History and former director of the Crofters’ Union, has delved into personal letters, Read More

Featured image of Gods of The Morning: A Bird’s Eye View of a Highland Year

Gods of The Morning: A Bird’s Eye View of a Highland Year

John Lister-Kaye’s ninth book, Gods of the Morning: A Bird’s Eye View of the Highland Year, reflects on landscape and wildlife, particularly birds – Virgil’s “gods of the morning” – over four seasons at Aigas, the Highland field centre by the Beauly River, which he owns. The book opens with the death of a blackcap Read More

Featured image of The Dance at Mociu

The Dance at Mociu

The factual stories and prose-poems of The Dance at Mociu chronicle Peter Riley’s travels through Transylvania, Romania with their carefully crafted portrayals of the scenery, people, traditions and above all the music of the region. Through diligent wording and description, Riley brings to life a world we almost certainly have never experienced, and assuming we Read More

Featured image of The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

From its title, Olivia Laing’s book The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone might give the impression of being some solemn self-help manual or brooding biography; instead, it is an honest and heart-wrenching exploration into one of life’s inexplicable plagues: loneliness. Finding herself alone in an altogether unfamiliar and alienating city, Laing Read More

Featured image of Glasgow: Mapping the City

Glasgow: Mapping the City

Likely every former Glasgow schoolchild – even those of us secretly from adjacent places like Renfrewshire – will have a notion of how Scotland’s largest city grew from its more easterly beginnings at one side of the Clyde. We all have a shadowy sense of how our city became something much bigger: more encompassing, and Read More

Featured image of Paradiso

Paradiso

This book deserves a review other than this one. I must not be its ideal reader. The author, Gillian Rose (1947-1995) was a philosopher, schooled at Oxford, who last held a position as Professor of Social and Political Thought at the University of Warwick. I briefly looked at her book Dialectic of Nihilism (1984) while Read More

Featured image of The Blue Touch Paper

The Blue Touch Paper

“I had at the end of 1968 become literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre.  This had happened largely by accident.”  This kind of lucky accident often happened to playwright and director David Hare, who in a poll in 2000 by the National Theatre, had five plays selected in the top 100 and was 10th Read More

Featured image of Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality

Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality

Thomas Lynch is an American award winning poet and writer. He won the American Book Award for his publication, Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, which was also short-listed for the National Book Award, and his essays and poems have appeared in a host of distinguished magazines and newspapers including Harper’s, The New Yorker, Read More

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