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Rear-view mirrors are not normal scientific equipment, nor are philosophers all that keen to recall a partly embarrassing past. But looking back can cure a self-induced narrowing of the modern scientific mind and help us to renew a sense of where, if anywhere, we might feel we belong in the world. Today, a centuries-long belief in the primacy of a first-personal perspective has given way to an opposite view that what passes through the consci...

Readers often come to know Kierkegaard's work through just one or two of the more widely mentioned of his twenty-eight publications. Here the first-time reader is offered an introduction to Kierkegaard that situates the texts in a context of the personal circumstances from which they arose. This makes it clear why Kierkegaard was able to conclude not only that writing had been his own education, but that posterity would find as much interest i...

Oh friends, not these sounds, let us instead strike up ones more pleasing and more joyful'. Written during the corona of 2020 and stretching into 2021, the sounds and words of music are here given a deeper and wider meaning. The words quoted above were Beethoven's own in the lockdown of his own deafness and just before letting the chorus loose to proclaim that 'all people become brothers'. The sounds he refers to are those of despair, exuberan...

Botswana's rapid transition between 1965 and 2016 from one of the poorest countries in the world to one rated as middle income has been extraordinary. Fifty years of change has seen the widespread disappearance of coal-fired locomotives and popularly used passenger trains, and ox drawn wagons. Blacksmiths, paraffin lamps, rondavels and thatched buildings, lime, women carrying buckets of water, metal water tanks have gone. The list goes on: the...

Botswana's rapid transition between 1965 and 2016 from one of the poorest countries in the world to one rated as middle income has been extraordinary. Fifty years of change has seen the widespread disappearance of coal-fired locomotives and popularly used passenger trains, and ox drawn wagons. Blacksmiths, paraffin lamps, rondavels and thatched buildings, lime, women carrying buckets of water, metal water tanks have gone. The list goes on: the...

Born in Tayport, Fife, on 5 June 1913, Douglas Young was one of the most charismatic and distinguished Scots of his day. Described by Nigel Tranter as a 'Poet, scholar, author, linguist, raconteur and fighter of causes', he was a genuine polymath, an intellectual giant, and his range of interests was exceptional. A brilliant Classical scholar, who studied and later taught Latin and Greek, he had a great facility for languages. Above all he was...

The life of Sir William Watson Cheyne spanned the flamboyant era of colonial expansion and some of the most important medical developments of the 19th century. His own role in these advances - as an eminent surgeon, an early researcher in medical bacteriology, a staunch ally of Lord Lister, an MP, and an intrepid traveller - has not previously been studied in depth. Fittingly for a man of meticulous detail, yet with a restless and pioneering i...

Expanding a hypothesis the author first developed in his earlier publications, this is an examination not merely of the extent to which ministers of the Church of Scotland, depending on their factional loyalties, sharply differed in the messages they sought to convey to their own congregations (and through the medium of print to the wider world) on a wide spectrum of contemporary issues, but also of how their own personalities impacted on thei...

Mochudi is in the Kgatleng District, where novelist and campaigner Naomi Mitchison was the adopted mother of Chief Linchwe II. Mochudi, the ninth biggest town in Botswana, is the home of the fictional Mma Ramotswe, of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Mochudi is where Sandy Grant, escaping a desk job in a London publishing house, arrived in 1963, three years before independence, and before either Mitchison, from her journalism in the 1960s, ...

Ottoman Turkey's First World War alliance with Germany provoked the first British invasion of Mesopotamia (Iraq), from India, in November 1914. A year later, General Townshend had to withdraw from Ctesiphon to Kut al-'Amarah, there to be besieged. Premature attempts were vainly made with great bloodshed to relieve him (including one involving bribery by T.E.Lawrence) until, after the longest ever imperial siege, more than a third of the garris...

In his own lifetime and for nearly a hundred years James Hogg was was seen as the natural, if lesser, inheritor of the mantle of Robert Burns. Hogg was "the Ettrick Shepherd, " self-taught, author of the long poem The Queen's Wake and numerous poems and songs of Border life and love, befriended by Walter Scott and presented in the pages of Blackwood's Magazine as a colourful, boastful, deep-drinking rustic. But with the American publication in...

Esther Warden was the 'terror' of West End Fremantle and the most dangerous woman in Western Australia. Lilly Doyle kept company with thieves and rogues and was listed as an 'undesirable'. May Ahern was a 'fallen' woman who lured men into dark street corners, tempting them away from the paths of virtue. Esther, Lilly and May were notorious female criminals in early twentieth-century Perth and Fremantle. Criminalised as drunks, prostitutes and ...

This study examines the economic and social consequences for Glasgow of the global crisis of capitalism known as the Great Depression, and how this is represented in five realist novels published during the 1930s. It is argued that the inter-war era was a time of both cultural renaissance and political revolution, and a liminal moment in Glasgow's history, defining economic and social conditions in the city for most of the twentieth century. I...

Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of Argyll and 1st Earl of Ilay, lived a long and very active life as soldier, lawyer, politician, patron and businessman. History remembers him on the one-hand as courageous, good-natured, learned and accomplished - and, on the other, as 'a man of little truth, little honour, little principle'. His substantial political career, driven by gaining and increasing his power and that of his friends, is poorly documented...

Sir James Barrie's fall from critical grace has been spectacular. Ranked in his own day with Shaw and Hardy, he is now usually dismissed as superficial, sentimental and commercial to the point of artistic dishonesty. Professor Jack argues that the naturalistic, psychological and national criteria used to condemn him are at odds with his proclaimed purposes. Using Barrie's own literary theory as contained in Sentimental Tommy and elsewhere, he ...

Born in Tayport, Fife, on 5 June 1913, Douglas Young was one of the most charismatic and distinguished Scots of his day. Described by Nigel Tranter as a 'Poet, scholar, author, linguist, raconteur and fighter of causes', he was a genuine polymath, an intellectual giant, and his range of interests was exceptional. A brilliant Classical scholar, who studied and later taught Latin and Greek, he had a great facility for languages. Above all he was...

Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of Argyll and 1st Earl of Ilay, lived a long and very active life as soldier, lawyer, politician, patron and businessman. History remembers him on the one-hand as courageous, good-natured, learned and accomplished - and, on the other, as 'a man of little truth, little honour, little principle'. His substantial political career, driven by gaining and increasing his power and that of his friends, is poorly documented...

Half a dozen young men find themselves at the end of their university years facing the awful prospect that they must now support themselves. They decide to found an Ideal Commonwealth, in the Navigator Islands - Samoa (where, by a wonderful coincidence, a decade later, Stevenson himself eventually settled and where he died and is buried). Here - they reason - work and money, dreary offices and dreary jobs, will not be known or needed. But capi...

The Scottish Enlightenment is often perceived as an Edinburgh phenomenon, centred on moral-political-economic questions and on the philosophical and historical interests of David Hume and his friends among the polite literati. In this new collection, the focus is squarely on eighteenth-century Glasgow, a thriving trading and industrial centre with a fine University, and on Women. The Glasgow sections look at three groups of men - the city's ea...

The life of Sir William Watson Cheyne spanned the flamboyant era of colonial expansion and some of the most important medical developments of the 19th century. His own role in these advances - as an eminent surgeon, an early researcher in medical bacteriology, a staunch ally of Lord Lister, an MP, and an intrepid traveller - has not previously been studied in depth. Fittingly for a man of meticulous detail, yet with a restless and pioneering i...