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
(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
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
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
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
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
“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
Published 150 years after the publication of Alice in Wonderland, this biography is a real treat of a read. Following his award winning biography of Charles Dickens, Douglas-Fairhurst takes us on a marvellous journey through the mind of the quiet academic Charles Dodgson and his alter ego Lewis Carroll. “‘Who in the world am I?’ Read More
John Aubrey (1625-97) has done it again – namely, got someone else to write his book for him. An odd chain of events is thereby generated. Aubrey – endlessly busying himself in retrieving, preserving, and collating other people’s work, whether contemporary or in England’s recent past – left himself little time or energy to do Read More
Andrew Hussey is a professor of Cultural History at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. His latest book, The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs, seems to be an extension of his previous one, Paris: The Secret History. However, this work is more overtly political as it reveals the relationship Read More