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Two stories about schoolboys at a Scottish public school.
Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that time, physicians started to argue that excessive music, or the wrong kind of music, could over-stimulate a vulnerable nervous system, leading to illness, immorality and even death. Since then there have been successive waves of moral panics about supposed epidemics of musical nervousness, caused by everything from Wagner to jazz and rock 'n' roll. It was this medical and critical debate that provided the psychiatric rhetoric of "degenerate music" that was the rationale for the perse...
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Jock Sinclair is a whiskey-drinking, by-the-bootstraps commanding officer of a peacetime Scottish battalion. Sinclair is a lifetime military man. He expects loyalty and respect from his men. But when Basil Barrow, an educated, by-the-book scion from a traditional military family enters the scene as Sinclair's replacement, the two men become locked in a fierce battle for control of the battalion and the hearts and minds of its men.
In 2017 Susie Kennaway asked her son Guy to kill her. 88 years old, with an older and infirm husband, Susie wanted to avoid sliding into infantilised catatonia. The son immediately started taking notes and Time to Go is the result. In turns a manual for those considering the benefits of assisted dying, a portrait of a mother son relationship, and a sympathetic description of old age, this book is a route map through the moral, legal, emotional, intellectual and practical maze that is the biggest issue facing the senior generations today: leaving life on their own terms. During their conversations about when and how to make Susie's final exit, some of the difficulties of their fractious relat...
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Tunes of Glory Household Ghosts Silence This volume collects three of the very best works by James Kennaway, the brilliant young novelist and screenwriter who tragically died in a car crash at the early age of forty. Memorably filmed with Alec Guinness and John Mills, Tunes of Glory is a grippingly dramatic exploration of the glamour and the brutality of post-war army life as the tensions and conflicts in the officers' mess of a Highland regiment lead to shame and tragedy. Household Ghosts is a claustrophobic tale of family tension, love triangles and the persistence of the past-one of Kennaway's favourite themes. Set in a country house in Scotland the book is haunted, like the privileged family it describes, by the ghosts of Scotland's own turbulent history. Taken from completed drafts on the author's desk, Silence tells of the accidental meeting and the complex union between a white man and a black woman in times of racial tension and sexual violence. Set in a North American city in midwinter Kennaway's last and brilliantly succinct novel expands into a universal allegory of suffering and death.