Showing posts with label Past. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Past. Show all posts

Tuesday 23 June 2015

**BOOKS worth reading on Scottish independence



Scotland Cultural Past; Our Independent Future by  Paul Henderson Scott. A former diplomat, Rector of Dundee university.   
https://www.waterstones.com/ebook/scotland/paul-henderson-scott/9781909912687
Follows the broad questions around Scottish Independence - with informed, easy to read articulate essays.

The English invented the legend of Brutus and made up false accounts of the Union. Most Scots were opposed to it- including Walter Scott.  Scott was no unionist, he argues contrary to what some writers put out and cites his essays Malachi and others which have been largely ignored. 
"The process continued with radical argument, political campaigning, the discovery of oil, nuclear subs on the Clyde, the Iraq War and above all by the example of the outstanding success of the other small European nations which have recovered Independence."

*Arguing for Independence; Evidence, Risk and the Wicked Issues by Stephen Maxwell.  Paul Henderson Scott states this book as the most comprehensive on Scottish Independence and that Maxwell writes of his life long work. He is a master of the issues -   the democratic, economic, social, international, cultural and environmental arguments.

Whaur Extremes Meet: Scotland's Twentieth Century by Catriona Macdonald

Unstated: Scottish Writers for Independence.

Arts of Independence by Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach. Explore cultural arguments for Scottish independence.  How the arts fire the imagination.

The Stone of Destiny by Ian Hamilton - made into a film in 2008.
Hamilton writes, ' On the morning of 11 April 1951, I left Glasgow with Bill Craig. At Stirling Bridge we thumbed    a lift from a car driven by Councillor Gray, which contained the Stone of Destiny, now carefully repaired. at midday we carried it down the grass-floored nave of the abbey and left it at the high later. It was a crucifixion.
When we turned away and stood for a minute at the gate, and looked down the long nave flanked by the blood-red sandstone of the wall s to the alter where the Stone lay under the blue and white of a Satire. I heard the voice of Scotland speak as clearly as it spoke in 1320.