Category: Reviews

Honest, informed reviews of Scotland’s restaurants, entertainment, whisky, and travel experiences.

‘Landmarks: Hugh MacDiarmid: The Brownsbank Years’, by Alexander Moffat, Ruth Nicol and Alan Riach Some readers may recall that not so long ago I reviewed a book almost identical to…

‘Slaves and Highlanders, Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean’, by David Alston (published by Edinburgh University Press) This is an excellent example of a scholarly book: detailed, well-documented, judicious,…

‘Archipelago, A Reader’, edited by Nicolas Allen and Fiona Stafford (published by the Lilliput Press, Dublin) This is both a lengthy and weighty volume. But its 578 pages are full…

Last month, 19 schoolchildren and two teachers were fatally shot in Uvalde, a small town in Texas. Reporting on the angry reactions in America, a BBC newsreader referred to the…

Good news of any kind is in short supply these days. Two areas of our life in which negative reports prevail are the behaviour of today’s teenagers, and the state…

Between 1987 and 1992 I had a role in CNNA (Council for National Academic Awards) chairing that organisation’s committee for the humanities. CNAA had been set up in1965 to supervise…

‘Thomas Muir of Huntershill, Essays for the Twenty First Century’, edited by Gerard Carruthers and Don Martin (humming earth) The degree to which Thomas Muir was or is a forgotten…

We have become obsessed with league tables. Claudio Raniero’s dismissal after Leicester City’s plunge down the premier league was front-page news for several days. I’ve just been reading about a…

  Glasgow-born Tom Gallagher is a retired professor of politics who taught at the University of Bradford. He is the author of 12 scholarly books, the majority published by such…