'Everyone interested in the battle, for whatever reason, would do well to read this engaging book' - Sunday Times History and politics often become entangled in Scotland. The past can serve as inspiration for the future to some, and a lesson for others in potential mistakes to avoid. One thing is certain, Scottish ...
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Do you ever wake up and feel just as disappointed with your life as you did when you went to sleep? Just as disillusioned? That’s me - well that’s my life - I always feel like I’m looking for something, but I just don’t know what it is yet. February 14th, Valentine’s Day. Another commercial scam to make us men pay ...
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There’s a knock at the door, and my heart drops into my stomach. I knew, with it being Christmas, that she’d have to come round at some point, feel obliged even, to grace us with her own unique brand of season’s greetings and goodwill to all men. But what I wouldn’t give to avoid another visit. I turn to look ...
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Colour. It was beautiful. It was light itself, reflecting to create endless wonders. Finished. The end. When the colour drained, everything was blamed, eyesight, the sun, us. Nothing can bring the colour back now. Now the world is just a spinning hole of darkness. Now the colour has gone forever. Colour was beauty and ...
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Nothing smells more like summer than a freshly mown hayfield. Even in winter, when the hay bales gathered under summer sunshine are broken into, the scent is enough to take me back to those achingly bright, cloudless days, permeated by sweltering heat and steeped in sweat, working the field with my scythe, until the ...
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When I was a little boy, my favourite thing to do in the world was to visit my grandmother, every Sunday, after church. We’d pull into the drive, in the bottle-green Morris Minor, and my father would step up to the door, heavy boots re- sounding on the porch, and rap the big, brass knocker with his signature five ...
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Joshua gazed down at the weighty gun in his hands and felt a heavy feeling settling in his gut. It looked absurdly disproportionate, held in his spindly, pale fingers. “Girl’s hands”, the other men liked to tease. He walked over to the other side of his bunk and reflected on his damp surroundings. He had never been ...
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Jasper stood rigidly, his wizened neck hiding beneath his balding head. His cagey eyes shone clear blue in the harsh summer sun as he glared at the children dancing around the Maypole with youthful glee, ribbons twirling and spinning with delight. Jasper shifted from one foot to another before giving into the pleas ...
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The palette clatters to the floor, and he watches it sullenly, running around his stockinged feet in impotent circles, before finally settling in the dust with one last, loud, sour note. He scratches his beard, quietly irritated. The offending palette lies flat on its face like a sulking child beneath him, its ...
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It looked like a spaceship from the seventies. Bright yellow and black, with a clear Perspex panel in the top so that you could look in to inspect the eggs inside. Every so often, you could hear it whirring into action, turning its plates with a low rumble, from its corner in the back of the boiler room. It was the ...
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