Embroidering Her Truth: Mary, Queen of Scots and the Language of Power

Banner-maker, community artist and textile curator, Clare Hunter won the Saltire First Book Award for her debut work, Threads of Life (2019), which became Waterstone’s Scottish Book of the Month and a Radio 4 Book of the Week. Embroidering Her Truth continues this historical thread, weaving readers through episodes in Mary Stuart’s life, with an intricate examination of embroideries, tapestries, and textiles, and the subliminal messages these held.

Man At Sea

iam Bell’s Man at Sea is a genre-defying delight that interrogates and reimagines the classic war novel. A domestic mystery set in Malta across the 1940s and 1960s, Man at Sea, follows the story of a former airman trying to reunite his old friend, Beth, with the son of her late wartime husband. The narrative is split between the airman, Stuart, and Beth’s stepson, with the former narrating the investigation alongside Beth during the 1960s. Beth’s Stepson acts as the second narrator, following his experience of the Siege of Malta through the 1940s. More than anything, this story is about the bonds people form through pain and fear and how complicated the love and relationships that arise from these shared experiences can be: ‘Could you not have left them a letter, huh? Just a word or two?’

WORDS AND STITCHES: A CONVERSATION WITH CLARE HUNTER

Sunshine streams in through the huge windows of Perth Concert Hall where Clare Hunter and I meet to talk about her book, Threads of Life, a History of the World through the Eye of a Needle. Recently published, this is a history of the social impact and political meaning of textiles. Armed with coffee and Read More

Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise

(UK, 2016) 31st October – 3rd November, DCA  Originally aired on BBC 4 in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Mark Cousins’ Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise is now touring small cinemas across the UK. Cousins, perhaps best known for his ambitious fifteen-hour long project The Story of Film: Read More

Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History

Lynn Gamwell (Princeton University Press, 2015); hbk, £37.95 Secondary school education seems to continually instil pupils with the concept of the incompatible nature of the discipline of mathematics and the arts. Indeed, such is the acceptance of their opposition that you tend to fall into the category of being good at one and not the Read More

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

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

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

Trumbo

“Are you or have you ever been Trumbo?” ask the promotional posters for Jay Roach’s Trumbo, a delicate piece that explores the real events of the McCarthy Era at the height of the paranoia surrounding The Cold War and Russian/Communist influence upon American citizens. Bryan Cranston masterfully takes on the role of Dalton Trumbo, a Read More