The Unreliable Narrator

Scotland is often imagined in the register of deep time: mountains scarred by glaciers, islands flung deep into the Atlantic, glens hollowed out by water and ice. Such wild places have inspired some of the nation’s most enduring writing. Yet for centuries, many Scots have lived not out in the hinterlands but in close quarters […]

The life of John Buchan reads like one of his adventure stories: as a storyteller and statesman, intelligence officer and international thinker, he roamed both continents and careers alike, leaping from one cliffhanger to the next. For all his public success, however, Buchan remains a curiously elusive figure. Was he the stiff Edwardian man of […]

Detective works were once seen as London’s domain – imperial in tone and centrally composed, unfolding in gentleman’s clubs and smoky drawing rooms. Yet long before fictional fact-finders patrolled Baker Street or puzzled over locked-room mysteries in Mayfair, the real work of modern urban policing was being pioneered further north – not in Scotland Yard […]

From oats and barley grew the Land o Cakes, a deceptively sweet and fluffy moniker for a place of rough terrain and lashing rain. A thrifty lot, the early Pictish settlers mastered the art of making hearty food from scant resources and turning water into heather ale to warm the throat. Although the days of […]

[…] memory and its fictions still revolve, as one by one the years climb to the attic and the thickening dust. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​​ ​ ​ ​ ​​ ​ ​ ​ ​​ ​ ​ ​ ​​ ​ ​ ​ ​​ ​ ​ ​ ​​ ​ ​ ​ ​Norman Kreitman, ‘Clearing the Attic’ If we […]

When Thomas More sketched out his vision in the sixteenth century of a sun-struck island idyll bobbing away merrily in the Atlantic swell, he ignited a centuries-long quest in dreamers and seekers across the world: the search for Utopia. Some took the sun as their guide, heading south in their pursuit of perfection; others, seduced […]

Education and Literature are old school friends. With buttoned-up blazer and responsible shoulders, Education sits at the front of class, passing to its peers the tools needed to navigate the world that loiters restlessly at the gates. Literature, that wild-eyed dreamer, lurks at the back of the room, scars the desk with secrets and stories, […]

Whether it appears in the form of anthrax island, a vibrating nuclear presence on the west coast, or, indeed, a deadly virus, each decade appears to unleash new potential for human devastation in Scotland and beyond. Waters rise, social unrest threatens, an invisible, digital, all-seeing eye tracks our every move – and so we go, edging […]

‘Trust the story. … the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can’t; the story can only ever be itself.’ – And the Land Lay Still, James Robertson 2022 marks a celebration across the nation for Scotland’s Year of Stories – but what is a story without its storyteller? (A question on which I, and […]

Should you ever find yourself roaming through woodland somewhere between the Rivers Sark and Esk, you might stumble across a long, linear, rather unassuming earthwork. You would be forgiven for carrying on your merry way without so much as a glance down at the unremarkable ditch-flanked bank, but stop! Haste ye back and look upon […]