14
Amount in millions of dollars of Mitt Romney’s earnings in 2011
14
Percentage rate at which Romney paid tax on these earnings
20
Percentage of four-digit PINS which are 1111, 0000, or 1234
26
Percentage of young Scots who will be 16 or 17 years old at the time of the referendum who support independence
29
Percentage of people living on the Falklands who consider themselves ‘British’
36
Percentage of the British public who want an increase in public spending even if it means raising taxes
48
Percentage of the Conservative Party’s annual income which comes from donations of more than £50,000
55
Age of Britain’s oldest parrot, who died recently
Thoughts about and by Scottish poets for the start of National Poetry Week
He [MacDiarmid] was the only person ever to have been expelled from the Communist Party for being a Scottish nationalist and from the Scottish National Party for being a communist
James Campbell
My job, as I see it, has never been to lay a tit’s egg; but to erupt like a volcano, emitting not
only flame but a load
of rubbish
Hugh MacDiarmid
Burns of all poets is the most a Man
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
It is worse than ridiculous to see the people of Dumfries coming forward with their pompous [Burns] mausoleum
William Wordsworth
Wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him
Lord Byron on Sir
Walter Scott
After a certain age all of us, good and bad, are guilt-stricken because of powers within us which have never been realised; because, in other words, we are not what we should be
Edwin Muir
An old pot seething with dissatisfaction which fortunately can be relied on never to come to
the boil
Edwin Morgan on Scotland
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Today’s banner:
Sutherland,
by Islay McLeod
Kenneth Roy asks some pointed questions about the background of the prosecution, trial and execution of John Henry Burnett in 1963. I can assist here and there. I made a radio documentary on the last execution in the mid 1990s. You may guess by the vagueness that I haven’t quite been able to lay hands on my programme file. I have found my tape of the programme, superbly narrated by Kevin Drummond QC, now Sheriff Drummond in Selkirk.