Bowhill, in the Scottish Borders was a modest Georgian villa with glorious views that grew into a huge mansion beloved of Sir Walter Scott. Its austere exterior belies the treasures within - rare Chinese wallpaper of birds and flowers, masterpieces by Claude and Canaletto and the Buccleuch collection of miniatures, second only to that of the Queen
Boughton, the Duke of Buccleuch's Northamptonshire home, was transformed from a Tudor manor into 'the English Versailles' by Ralph, 1st Duke of Montagu, Charles II's envoy to Louis XIV. It houses splendid portraits of Elizabeth I, Charles II's son the Duke of Monmouth, another Buccleuch ancestor, and Shakespeare's muse, the Countess of Southampton.
With its simple form and dark greywacke stone, its great mass spread along a plain grassy platform above the Ettrick Valley, Bowhill might be thought to verge on the austere, even the institutional. For the approaching visitor their is no hint of a family whose ties thread for centuries back through the histories of Scotland and England, little to encourage hope that rich and varied art collections might lie within, or even that these solid stones might have resonated with festivities and celebrations, the setting for warm sentiments and deeper emotions. Bowhill is a most deceptive house.
This book is a sequel to Richard Griffiths’s two highly successful previous books on the British pro-Nazi Right, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933-39 and Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939-1940. It follows the fortunes of his protagonists after the arrests of May-June 1940, and charts their very varied reactions to the failure of their cause, while also looking at the possible reasons for the Government’s failure to detain prominent pro-Nazis from the higher strata of society. Some of the pro-Nazis continued with their original views, and even undertook politically subversive activity, here and in Germany. Others, finding that their pre-war balance between patriotism and pro-Nazism had now tipped firmly on the side of patriotism, fully supported the war effort, while still maintaining their old views privately. Other people found that events had made them change their views sincerely. And then there were those who, frightened by the prospect of detention or disgrace, tried to hide or even to deny their former views by a variety of subterfuges, including attacking former colleagues. This wide variety of reactions sheds new light on the equally wide range of reasons for their original admiration for Nazism, and also gives us some more general insight into what could be termed ‘the psychology of failure’.
Today, Scotland's history is frequently associated with the clarion call of political nationalism. However, in the nineteenth century the influence of history on Scottish national identity was far more ambiguous. How, then, did ideas about the past shape Scottish identity in a period when union with England was all but unquestioned? The activities of the antiquary Cosmo Innes (1798-1874) help us to address this question. Innes was a prolific editor of medieval and early modern documents relating to Scotland's parliament, legal system, burghs, universities, aristocratic families and pre-Reformation church. Yet unlike scholars today, he saw that editorial role in interventionist terms. His source editions were artificial constructs that powerfully articulated his worldview and agendas: emphasising Enlightenment-inspired narratives of social progress and institutional development. At the same time they used manuscript facsimiles and images of medieval architecture to foreground a romantic concern for the texture of past lives. Innes operated within an elite associational culture which gave him access to the leading intellectuals and politicians of the day. His representations of Scottish history therefore had significant influence and were put to work as commentaries on some of the major debates which exorcised Scotland's intelligentsia across the middle decades of the century. This analysis of Innes's work with sources, set within the intellectual context of the time and against the antiquarian activities of his contemporaries, provides a window onto the ways in which the 'national past' was perceived in Scotland during the nineteenth century. This allows us to explore how historical thinkers negotiated the apparent dichotomies between Enlightenment and Romanticism, whilst at the same time enabling a re-examination of prevailing assumptions about Scotland's supposed failure to maintain a viable national consciousness in the later 1800s.
This book examines how the French invention and the Scottish re-invention of historical fiction prepared the genre's popularity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Spending a night in a small campervan every week for 52 consecutive weeks may sound crazy. But that was not enough to put RICHARD HARRIS off what he called his 'great daft adventure'. So all through the summer, autumn, winter and spring - through sun, rain, gales, ice and snow - he set off once a week in his ancient Bongo van. Just because he could. In BONGO NIGHTS he tells the story of that unforgettable year: How he broke his leg and injured his back . . . but carried on regardless How he inadvertently spent two nights in places associated with murder How he skidded backwards down a hill and crashed into a wall in a blizzard. How he fled in embarrassment when he didn't like the company he was keeping in an isolated lay-by How he spent a night at a Buddhist temple - after passing an hour in the company of a dead nun
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