Two natives, one b*stard and a mighty bog... A Girl Called Jake draws on a translation from a hitherto secret archive to tell the story of a gigantic narcotics plant that's built upon a mighty bog. But in a strange and distant land, a rising for liberty is crushed with vicious and unparalleled violence. And in the country of the book's principal action an agitation grows - and grows. For here too is a disturbing spirit of national sentiment. And here too a rising - a strictly unconstitutional affair!!! - takes place. So in the giant plant is fought once more one of the great battles of classical antiquity. But in the very moment of victory - defeat! For just as the cops’ big bust gets under way - the whole plant tilts and flips, and sinks forever in its mighty bog: and everything goes back to the good old way that it was. With an introduction: and, by the translator, an afterword.
A Nation in Want of a Grievance takes its name from a 19th century editorial in the Times newspaper. It consists of a collection of 35 essays written in Scotland around the end of the 20th century and the start of the present 21st century. Some of these are directly concerned with Scotland, some are not. Some are documentary in character, others are fictional. The first essay is a memoir, in a spirit of fictionised reportage, of the last herring-fishery on the west coast of Scotland – a fishery in which the author took part as a trawler deck-hand. A second piece in the collection is a re-jig of Lady Gregory's famous little one-act play, The Rising of the Moon, which has been re-written and located in the post-Jacobite Highlands of 1746. One piece of extended and research-intensive journalism examines in detail the long record of landlord chicanery relating to popular access to the waters of Loch Morar in western Lochaber. Another piece draws extensively on French and Spanish resources to tell the story – so far as it can be told – of Duncan Stewart of Balquidder, private doctor to Le Roi Christophe, the famous monarch of post-revolutionary Haiti. Oysters from Sweetings, meanwhile, is a fictional comment on modern Scotland in the style of John Buchan. The collection ends with two newspaper editorials. One, from a post-war edition of the Scotsman newspaper, is fictional, and relates to the forced merger of the churches of Scotland and England. The other is the Times editorial from the 19th century, in which Scotland is castigated as a nation in want of a grievance.
This novel is the first in a projected five-part series called The Second British Protectorate – a series of high-concept, story-driven commercial fictions from the viewpoint of alternate history, supposing a sovietised post-war Britain formally modelled on Cromwell's 17th century Protectorate. The themes are both historical and modern. For instance – what shape would a popular rising against such a state have taken? Who would have collaborated with the regime – who might have resisted – and who might have loafed on the leathered benches of least resistance? What would the state's religious policy have been? Might that policy have forced the merger of the churches of Scotland and England? Might the religious and messianic mania of the 17th century have returned? Might it have been believed that Jesus had come (back) to England? Might George VI have gone to the scaffold as Charles I had – dead by winter axe in London's Whitehall? What role would the great lawyers of the land and their sacred notions of constitutionality and amour-propre (not to mention the school-fees) have had in all of this? What about civil liberties, and clear and present dangers to the state? What about the asymmetric distribution of lethal capacities for oppression and resistance? What about the nature of religious identity as the ideology of that resistance? What role might cocaine have played in a ruined command-economy with a worthless currency? Might the Americans have smuggled it into Britain in huge quantities as a way of funding democratic terrorism? The Trial and Execution of George VI - as a popular rising is savagely crushed and the Messiah comes (back?) to Britain, a shipment of best American cocaine is swapped in the ruins of Perth for the lives of the King, his Queen and their kids. But what happened next – to the coke?
This novel is the second in a projected five-part series called The Second British Protectorate – a series of high-concept, story-driven commercial fictions from the viewpoint of alternate history, supposing a sovietised post-war Britain modelled on Cromwell's 17th century Protectorate. The themes are both historical and modern. For instance – what shape would a popular rising against such a state have taken? Who would have collaborated with the regime – who might have resisted – and who might have loafed on the leathered benches of least resistance? What would the state's religious policy have been? Might that policy have forced the merger of the churches of Scotland and England? Might the religious and messianic mania of the 17th century have returned? Might it have been believed that Jesus had come (back) to England? Might George VI have gone to the scaffold as Charles I had – dead by winter axe in London's Whitehall? What role would the great lawyers of the land and their sacred notions of constitutionality and amour-propre (not to mention the school-fees) have had in all of this? What about civil liberties, and clear and present dangers to the state? What about the asymmetric distribution of lethal capacities for oppression and resistance? What about the nature of religious identity as the ideology of that resistance? What role might cocaine have played in a ruined command-economy with a worthless currency? Might the Americans have smuggled it into Britain in huge quantities as a way of funding democratic terrorism? The Glenfinnan Manuscript (the lass with the siller buckle) - as the churches of Scotland and England are forced to merge, a band of outlaw Daniels murder the Archbishop of Canterbury in the very centre of Edinburgh, and escape with six tons of English (or British) gold. But – where is that gold now?
Highland Resistance takes as its subject the record of land-centred (and by implication culture- and nationality- centred) conflict in the Highlands of Scotland during the two and a half centuries since the Jacobite rising of 1745. The book tells the story of anti-landlord agitation and direct-action land-raiding from the great sheep-drives in Sutherland at the end of the eighteenth century, on through the anti-eviction resistance that characterised the worst years of the notorious Clearances, and on again by way of the huge crofters' agitation of the 1880s to continuing inter-war raiding and reform and the last great land-grab at Knoydart in the 1940s. By setting this record in its context Highland Resistance shows its continuing political and cultural importance to our own times, as Scotland and her reborn parliament enter a new century and a new millennium. The principal arguments of Highland Resistance are that there is a long and deep anti-landlord tradition in the Highlands; that this tradition has been under-pinned with an identity that can justly be identified as one of agrarian and cultural radicalism and nationalism; and that this tradition in one form or another lives on today, with a sharp and controversial resonance for the Highlands, and Scotland, of tomorrow.
Near the end of the nineteenth century, the Gaelic-speaking crofters of the Scottish Highlands rose in revolutionary struggle against their English landlords for the right to live in security on their own ancestral clan lands.
A Nation in Want of a Grievance takes its name from a 19th century editorial in the Times newspaper. It consists of a collection of 35 essays written in Scotland around the end of the 20th century and the start of the present 21st century. Some of these are directly concerned with Scotland, some are not. Some are documentary in character, others are fictional. The first essay is a memoir, in a spirit of fictionised reportage, of the last herring-fishery on the west coast of Scotland – a fishery in which the author took part as a trawler deck-hand. A second piece in the collection is a re-jig of Lady Gregory's famous little one-act play, The Rising of the Moon, which has been re-written and located in the post-Jacobite Highlands of 1746. One piece of extended and research-intensive journalism examines in detail the long record of landlord chicanery relating to popular access to the waters of Loch Morar in western Lochaber. Another piece draws extensively on French and Spanish resources to tell the story – so far as it can be told – of Duncan Stewart of Balquidder, private doctor to Le Roi Christophe, the famous monarch of post-revolutionary Haiti. Oysters from Sweetings, meanwhile, is a fictional comment on modern Scotland in the style of John Buchan. The collection ends with two newspaper editorials. One, from a post-war edition of the Scotsman newspaper, is fictional, and relates to the forced merger of the churches of Scotland and England. The other is the Times editorial from the 19th century, in which Scotland is castigated as a nation in want of a grievance.
Two natives, one b*stard and a mighty bog... A Girl Called Jake draws on a translation from a hitherto secret archive to tell the story of a gigantic narcotics plant that's built upon a mighty bog. But in a strange and distant land, a rising for liberty is crushed with vicious and unparalleled violence. And in the country of the book's principal action an agitation grows - and grows. For here too is a disturbing spirit of national sentiment. And here too a rising - a strictly unconstitutional affair!!! - takes place. So in the giant plant is fought once more one of the great battles of classical antiquity. But in the very moment of victory - defeat! For just as the cops’ big bust gets under way - the whole plant tilts and flips, and sinks forever in its mighty bog: and everything goes back to the good old way that it was. With an introduction: and, by the translator, an afterword.
Highland Resistance takes as its subject the record of land-centred (and by implication culture- and nationality- centred) conflict in the Highlands of Scotland during the two and a half centuries since the Jacobite rising of 1745. The book tells the story of anti-landlord agitation and direct-action land-raiding from the great sheep-drives in Sutherland at the end of the eighteenth century, on through the anti-eviction resistance that characterised the worst years of the notorious Clearances, and on again by way of the huge crofters' agitation of the 1880s to continuing inter-war raiding and reform and the last great land-grab at Knoydart in the 1940s. By setting this record in its context Highland Resistance shows its continuing political and cultural importance to our own times, as Scotland and her reborn parliament enter a new century and a new millennium. The principal arguments of Highland Resistance are that there is a long and deep anti-landlord tradition in the Highlands; that this tradition has been under-pinned with an identity that can justly be identified as one of agrarian and cultural radicalism and nationalism; and that this tradition in one form or another lives on today, with a sharp and controversial resonance for the Highlands, and Scotland, of tomorrow.
This novel is the first in a projected five-part series called The Second British Protectorate – a series of high-concept, story-driven commercial fictions from the viewpoint of alternate history, supposing a sovietised post-war Britain formally modelled on Cromwell's 17th century Protectorate. The themes are both historical and modern. For instance – what shape would a popular rising against such a state have taken? Who would have collaborated with the regime – who might have resisted – and who might have loafed on the leathered benches of least resistance? What would the state's religious policy have been? Might that policy have forced the merger of the churches of Scotland and England? Might the religious and messianic mania of the 17th century have returned? Might it have been believed that Jesus had come (back) to England? Might George VI have gone to the scaffold as Charles I had – dead by winter axe in London's Whitehall? What role would the great lawyers of the land and their sacred notions of constitutionality and amour-propre (not to mention the school-fees) have had in all of this? What about civil liberties, and clear and present dangers to the state? What about the asymmetric distribution of lethal capacities for oppression and resistance? What about the nature of religious identity as the ideology of that resistance? What role might cocaine have played in a ruined command-economy with a worthless currency? Might the Americans have smuggled it into Britain in huge quantities as a way of funding democratic terrorism? The Trial and Execution of George VI - as a popular rising is savagely crushed and the Messiah comes (back?) to Britain, a shipment of best American cocaine is swapped in the ruins of Perth for the lives of the King, his Queen and their kids. But what happened next – to the coke?
This novel is the second in a projected five-part series called The Second British Protectorate – a series of high-concept, story-driven commercial fictions from the viewpoint of alternate history, supposing a sovietised post-war Britain modelled on Cromwell's 17th century Protectorate. The themes are both historical and modern. For instance – what shape would a popular rising against such a state have taken? Who would have collaborated with the regime – who might have resisted – and who might have loafed on the leathered benches of least resistance? What would the state's religious policy have been? Might that policy have forced the merger of the churches of Scotland and England? Might the religious and messianic mania of the 17th century have returned? Might it have been believed that Jesus had come (back) to England? Might George VI have gone to the scaffold as Charles I had – dead by winter axe in London's Whitehall? What role would the great lawyers of the land and their sacred notions of constitutionality and amour-propre (not to mention the school-fees) have had in all of this? What about civil liberties, and clear and present dangers to the state? What about the asymmetric distribution of lethal capacities for oppression and resistance? What about the nature of religious identity as the ideology of that resistance? What role might cocaine have played in a ruined command-economy with a worthless currency? Might the Americans have smuggled it into Britain in huge quantities as a way of funding democratic terrorism? The Glenfinnan Manuscript (the lass with the siller buckle) - as the churches of Scotland and England are forced to merge, a band of outlaw Daniels murder the Archbishop of Canterbury in the very centre of Edinburgh, and escape with six tons of English (or British) gold. But – where is that gold now?
Near the end of the nineteenth century, the Gaelic-speaking crofters of the Scottish Highlands rose in revolutionary struggle against their English landlords for the right to live in security on their own ancestral clan lands.
In November 1918, the implementation of agrarian change in the Scottish Highlands threatened another wave of unemployment and eviction for the land-working population, which led to widespread and varied social protest. Those who had been away on war service (and their families) faced returning to exactly the same social and economic conditions in the Scottish Highlands they had hoped they had left behind in the struggle to make ’a land fit for heroes’. Widespread and varied social protest rapidly followed. It argues that, previously, there has been a failure to capture fully the geography, chronology typology and rate of occurrence of these events. The book not only offers new insights and a greater understanding of what was happening in the Highlands in this period, but illustrates how a range of forms of protest were used which demand attention, not least for the fact that these events, unlike most of the earlier Land Wars period, were successful. There are functioning townships in the Highlands today that owe their existence to the land invasions of the 1920s. The book innovatively concentrates on formulating explanation and interpretation from within and looks to the crofting landscape as base, means and motive to disturbance and interpretation. It proposes that protest is much more convincingly understood as an expression of environmental ethics from 'the bottom up' coming increasingly into conflict with conservationist views expressed from 'the top down' It focuses on individual case studies in order to engage more convincingly with an important evidential base - that of popular memory of land disturbances - and to adopt a frame and lens through which to explore the fluid and contingent nature of protest performances. Based upon the belief that in the study of landscapes of social protest the old shibboleth of space as solely passive setting and symbolic register is no longer tenable is paid here to nature/culture interactions, to vernacular ecological b
The story of one of the last great Highland sporting estates, told through the account of a typical year in the life of the head gamekeeper, Charlie Pirie.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.