mcleanscotland favourite Scottish writers stories about Scotland and Scots

Some favourites of Paul: authors and books that ooze Scotland! Oh aye, and some new one's!

Do you like reading British History? Well, take a look at this website, it is a book publisher here in Britain www.pen-and-sword.co.uk whom I cannot say enough about! Brilliant selection of historic and warfare books, many on Scotland and our people.

Here are just a few examples of what they have; A fantastic new book by Nicolas Maclean - Bristol of Coll. Go get this one for sure!

Many heroes emerged during the First World War, but only one man was twice awarded the Victoria Cross during that conflict. This was Captain Noel Godfrey Chavasse, serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps as Medical Officer to the 10th Battalion, the King’s (Liverpool Regiment) - the Liverpool Scottish.

The London Scottish. The book demonstrates as no history of the London Scottish has before the hopes sufferings and aspirations of the volunteers who filled its ranks, so many of who made the supreme sacrifice. Both shown above, visit this website, it is great!

ANOTHER FROM PEN AND SWORD: Culloden Moor is the last and one of the most famous battles in British history. On 16 April 1746 the Duke of Cumberland's government army defeated the Jacobite rebels led by Prince Charles Edward Stuart.

In this concise account Stuart Reid, the leading authority on Culloden, sets out in a graphic and easily understood way the movements and deployments of the opposing armies and describes in detail the close and deadly combat that followed. His account incorporates the results of the latest documentary and archaeological research and he provides a full tour of the battlefield so that visitors can explore for themselves the historic ground on which this momentous event took place.

www.mullionataxi.com/coach.htm interesting for mull
www.uii-mull.net/romhc/pubs.htm

Kilvickeon Church and Graveyard This ruined chapel on the Ross of Mull, (NM 412196), dates from the 13th century and is a prime example of early church building in Scotland. Reputed to have been built on an pre-existing Christian site, Kilvickeon translates from the native Gaelic as "Church of the son of Eoghan" - Eoghan was a nephew of St Columba. With Iona, the cradle of Christianity, so near at hand many of the missionaries would have passed through the area as they went off on their travels. Kilvickeon was linked or united with many other local parishes in its history, ending up as the Parish Church of Kilvickeon with Kilninian which served the whole Ross of Mull, before its final demise in 1804 when the present Parish Church in Bunessan was built. We know from the First Statistical Account (c 1792) that the original building had been in dire straits for some time. Today, the ruin stands in the midst of its burial ground, in a bleak and windswept part of the island, but with an atmosphere all of its own. www.bunessan.bordernet.co.uk/history/kilvickeon.html

Nigel Tranter - the very best author to mix fact with historic novels, my all time favourite Scots writer, thanks Nigel for all those history lessons, Paul McLean See Scotland's Storyteller at www.nigeltranter.co.uk - The Nigel Tranter Web Site. "From 1935 to 2000 Nigel Tranter wrote over 140 books including his famous Scottish historical Novels, factual books about Scotland and the Scots, novels set in Scotland, and other countries, westerns, under a pseudonym, and a series of books for children. When he died on the 9th of January 2000, aged 90 years, many of his loyal readers wanted to create a memorial to encapsulate the love and respect that people have for him and his work. Hopefully these pages go some way to meeting these requirements and, in them, you will find details of the man, the most complete timeline of his literary work on the internet See a Focus on Nigel Tranter at www.his.com/~rory/tranter.html "Nigel Tranter not only published more books than any other Scot but no one even comes close to having as many books currently in print, certainly the acid test of popularity. Among the reasons for his prolificacy is the fact that, even though he lived into his 90th year he did his writing "on-the-hoof", as he called it -- while walking daily by the shore of Aberlady Bay on the Firth of Forth near his home at Gullane some eighteen miles east of Edinburgh. He lead a very active life right to the end even though he had moved to a modern house with gas heat rather than having to chop wood to heat the 17th century Quarry House where he lived for the previous fifty years. "

THE BLACK WATCH BY TREVOR ROYLE (Mainstream, £12.99)
"THE Highland furies rushed in upon us with more violence than ever did a sea driven by a tempest." So recalled a French observer in the early days of the Black Watch. The idea of their "wildness" did the Highland regiments no harm at all in the field, Royle points out, while they themselves enjoyed being marked out from the red-coated rank and file. But Black Watch was always much more than an attractive tartan, as this chronicle of three centuries' tough soldiering makes clear: the glamour of this great regiment - now of course no more - was earned the hard way.

SCOTS WHO MADE AMERICA BY RICK WILSON (Birlinn, £7.99)
"AMERICA would have been a very poor show if it had not been for the Scots," reads the quote from Andrew Carnegie on the front cover. This might have been more inspiring had it not just emerged that Carnegie's military record was more George W than JFK. But then men (no women here) may impact in all sorts of ways, and it's to the credit of this celebration that it doesn't take itself, or its Scots subjects, too seriously. Anyone who doubts the significance of Scots for America need only riffle through the sections here on everyone from Captain Kidd to Sean Connery.

DEFOE IN SCOTLAND EDITED BY ANNE McKIM (Scottish Cultural Press, £19.99)
THE name's Defoe ... Daniel Defoe. Licensed to quill, sending back secret letters to English Secretary of State Sir Robert Harley, the author of Robinson Crusoe made a number of forays north to spy on the Scots. In the years before and after the Act of Union he not only monitored the activities of pro-Jacobite groups but reported on the mood in more loyal circles. These were less than swashbuckling ventures, if truth be told, but so shrewd an observer and so fresh a stylist is worth reading on just about any subject.

NOTORIOUS MURDERS, BLACK LANTERNS, AND MOVEABLE GOODS, DEBORAH A SYMONDS
(Akron, $39.95) IT WAS the golden age of Edinburgh villainy: the time of Burke and Hare; a period that fostered some of our most unforgettable fictions. This book looks behind the lurid stage-fire to find an underclass of ordinary, decent criminals, jobbing thieves for whom petty misdemeanours were a way of life. This is explicitly a demystifying work, and Symonds's earnest, academic-Marxist tone can alienate a little, but even so she gives us an exciting insight into a long-forgotten yet fascinating sub-society.

Culloden Written by John Prebble The story of the famous battle - from the acclaimed expert on Scottish history. The book begins in the rain at five o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, 16 April 1746, when the Royal Army marched out of Nairn to fight the clans on Culloden Moor. The Darien Disaster by John Prebble The first detailed account of the Darien Settlement, drawn from the journals, letters and memoirs of those who tried to turn Paterson’s dream into reality. A PIECE OF SCOTTISH HISTORY MUCH OVERLOOKED! GLENCOE is another great book by Prebble. Many excellent books by Prebble, any one of them is a must for your Scottish collection.

Sample Cover

Fitzroy MacLean Sir Fitzroy Hew Royle MacLean, 1st Baronet of Dunconnel, (March 11, 1911, Egypt - June 15, 1996, Scotland) was a Scottish diplomat, adventurer, writer and politician. In Eastern Approaches, MacLean recounted his extraordinary adventures in Soviet Central Asia, and in the Western Desert Campaign, where he specialized in commando raids behind enemy lines. It has been speculated that Maclean was an inspiration for Ian Fleming's James Bond, although Fleming has never named any real-life person as any sort of inspiration beyond his friend William Stephenson. MacLean went to school at Eton College, followed by King's College, Cambridge University. On going down from Cambridge, he joined the Diplomatic Service in 1933. His ancestral home was Duart Castle on the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides. Highlanders: Unmatched in its romantic resonance, Scotland's remote landscape offers tales of courage and savagery, of loyalty and treachery--legends set against a panorama of wild beauty. One of my favourites: Bonnie Prince Charlie, a great read!

Alistair MacLean was born in Glasgow in 1922. (well his books do not ooze Scotland, but he did a lot for us) A son of the manse, he spent his early years in Daviot near Inverness. Joined the Royal Navy at the outbreak of the Second World War. He served on the Russian convoys, in the Aegean and the Far East, and his experiences in the navy provided the background for his early novels. After the war MacLean attended Glasgow University, graduating in 1947. He began teaching English in Gallowflat School, Rutherglen and began writing short stories, some of which were published in Blackwood's magazine. At the age of 32 he entered a short story competition in The Glasgow herald, which he won with a story entitled The Dileas receiving a prize of £100. Ian Chapman, an editor with Collins, was so impressed by the story he asked MacLean to attempt a novel. He received the manuscript of HMS Ulysses ten weeks later. The novel drew heavily on the author's experiences of the Russian convoys and became one of the most successful British novels of all time, selling 250,000 hardback copies within six months. This success was followed by Guns of Navarone, and South by Java Head, both of which later became films, and MacLean's reputation was established. He was a master of pace, often at the expense of characterisation, keeping the action moving so that the reader had no time to stop and think. Alistair MacLean died in February 1987 in Munich and was buried in Celigny, Switzerland.

Sorley MacLean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain) - Poet (1911-1996) Articles commemorating the passing of Sorley MacLean were a "Feature of the week" on The Capital Scot and may be found at Sorley MacLean - an Obituary. This is an excerpt from that obituary. "Sorley MacLean is undisputedly one of the greatest writers in Gaelic, and his death in 1998 occasioned a tremendous outpouring of tributes honouring his contribution to Gaelic culture. He was highly respected as a thinker and commentator on matters social, political and literary. His Gaelic writing, particularly the gift of his poems, has been a crucial element in the remarkable renaissance of the Gaelic language, spoken and written, not only in Scotland but in the Gaelic speaking areas of Canada and North America."

Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, 22nd May 1859, to Roman Catholic parents of Irish origin. Educated locally and by the Jesuits at Stonyhurst College, the boy then graduated from Edinburgh University in medicine in 1881. His first short story had been published in Chambers's journal in September 1879, and his first non-fiction in the British medical journal the same month. A crude, unpublished story from this time shows him experimenting with two lead characters, a daring master of arcane scientific perceptions and a down-to-earth narrator inviting audience identification, but it was not until 1886 that the ultimate development of the two types came to life in A Study in scarlet, as the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his fellow-lodger Dr Watson. He died in 1930 having been married twice and fathered five children. (well his don't really ooze Scotland eh, but they are great stories)

Walter Scott was born on 15th August 1771 in the Old Town of Edinburgh. All his adult life he was a working lawyer, but this did not prevent him from a social life which put him at the centre of literary Edinburgh (some would say, literary Scotland) and a steady involvement in prose writing, reviewing and periodical publication. No one thing would ever satisfy Scott, however. He took to castle-building - his gothic pile of Abbotsford near Melrose - and to entertaining, and he saw the threat that Byron posed to his supremacy as poet. The answer was Waverley (1814), a tour de force which catapulted historical fiction into public consciousness and popularity, and made Scott world famous again, this time as the anonymous (though it was an open secret) "Author of Waverley". A stream of successes followed, including Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), Old mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1818), The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and - best of all - Redgauntlet (1824). He produced a torrent of work, fiction and critical prose mostly, which slowly but steadily paid off his patient creditors, but at a terrible price to Scott's health. a series of strokes crippled him, and he died in 1832 - though the sale of his copyrights pretty well paid off his debts. Despite all, these late years produced wonderful work of the quality of The Chronicles of the Canongate, which included The Fair maid of Perth (1828). BY FAR MY FAVOURITE IS HIS "TALES OF A GRANDFATHER" TRY AND GET A COPY IF YOU CAN!

Robert Louis Stevenson grew up in Edinburgh, and this profoundly shaped his writing. He was born on 13th November 1850 and from earliest childhood he was frequently ill, which influenced a fertile imagination. It was assumed that Stevenson would follow the profession of his father, Thomas Stevenson, a distinguished lighthouse and harbour engineer, and he studied engineering at Edinburgh University. However, in his twenty-first year he announced his intention of becoming a writer. Treasure Island was published in volume form in 1883. He did not become popular until 1886, with the publication of Kidnapped and Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the first gaining critical esteem, the second a best-seller which made his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. Stevenson was absorbed by Scottish history and Scottish character, and this fascination is an essential aspect of his writing.


Prince Across the Water by Jane Yolen	Culloden 1746: The Highland Clans' Last Charge by Peter Harrington	On the Trail of Bonnie Prince Charlie by David R. Ross	Culloden Moor 1746 by Stuart Reid A study of the final demise of the Jacobite cause on Culloden Moor in 1746.	Culloden and the '45 by Jeremy Black


The Picts and the Scots - the Dalriada invaders from Ireland, Available from Amazon.com	A History of Scotland A popular and readable. Written by Bruce Lenman. Well worth buying.	Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser - another great author	THE SCOTTISH NATION 1700-2000 T. M. Devine I will read this again myself	Mull, The Island and Its People: Jo Currie. based on research into a vast archive of rarely seen or previously unknown documents, particularly the original correspondence of the Macleans and Maclaines.


The Art of the Picts, Sculpture and Metalwork in Early Medieval Scotland: George and Isabel Henderson. Art-historical analysis of the work of the Picts, perhaps the least well-known of the Celtic peoples, who occupied the north	The Crannogs of Scotland: An Underwater Archaeology: Nicholas Dixon	Dunadd, an Early Dalriadic Capital: Alan Lane, Ewan Campbell The kingdom of "Dal Raita" emerged in Argyll in the early centuries AD, after the Romans had abandoned Scotland.	Historic Scotland: Celtic Scotland: Ian Armit. Iron Age tribes, into Picts, Scots and Britons, and reconstruction drawings and photographs to illustrate what Celtic life was like.	A historical record compiled from the rolls made by the Hanoverian army after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Every Scottish regiment present at the battle has been recorded. A MUST BUY BOOK