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John Prebble's Scotland
At the age of twenty-one, John Prebble set out to ‘discover’ Scotland, and just as Scott had been enthralled by this fiercely distinctive land, so Prebble’s imagination was similarly enchanted and challenged. The Lion in the North and Culloden, amongst others, are part of that lifelong fascination but John Prebble’s Scotland is a direct result of the re-tracing of earlier steps, drawing upon a rich store of social history, anecdote, folklore and literature to conduct the reader through the Highlands, Isles and Borders. A ‘beautifully written “voyage sentimentale et historique” through romantic Scotland’ Sunday Telegraph ‘People sometimes ask me to recommend a book about Scotland. I shall recommend this one’ Scotsman
The Highland Clearances
In the terrible aftermath of the moorland battle of Culloden, the Highlanders suffered at the hands of their own clan chiefs. Following his magnificent reconstruction of Culloden, John Prebble recounts how the Highlanders were deserted and then betrayed into famine and poverty. While their chiefs grew rich on meat and wool, the people died of cholera and starvation or, evicted from the glens to make way for sheep, were forced to emigrate to foreign lands. ‘Mr Prebble tells a terrible story excellently. There is little need to search further to explain so much of the sadness and emptiness of the northern Highlands today’ The Times.
Culloden
For years the legend of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the black memory of Butcher Cumberland have blossomed side by side. Here, from memoirs, letters, newspapers and regimental order books, the author reconstructs the battle and the months that followed.
Glencoe
'You are hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, and to put all to the sword under seventy.' This was the treacherous and cold-blooded order ruthlessly carried out on 13 February 1692, when the Campbells slaughtered their hosts the MacDonalds at the Massacre of Glencoe. It was a bloody incident which had deep repercussions and was the beginning of the destruction of the Highlanders. John Prebble’s masterly description of the terrible events at Glencoe was praised as ‘Evocative and powerful’ in the Sunday Telegraph.
Mutiny
An account of the mutinies in Highland regiments, beginning with the noble revolt of the Black Watch at Finchley in 1743 and ending with the mutiny of the starving Fencibles on Glasgow Green in 1804. This book completes Prebble's account of the Highland clans, which he began in Culloden.
The Darien Disaster
In 1698 the Parliament of Scotland, in one of its last acts before the nation lost its political identity, decided to establish a noble trading company and settle a colony. The site chosen for the colony was Darien on the Isthmus of Panama. Three years later the "noble undertaking", crippled by the quarrelsome stupidity of its leaders, deliberately obstructed by the English Government, and opposed in arms of Spain, had ended in stunning disaster. Nine fine ships owned by the Company had been sunk, burnt or abandoned. Over two thousand men, women and children who went to the fever-ridden colony never returned.
The Scottish Clearances
'A superb book ... Anybody interested in Scottish history needs to read it' Andrew Marr, Sunday Times Eighteenth-century Scotland is famed for generating many of the enlightened ideas which helped to shape the modern world. But there was in the same period another side to the history of the nation. Many of Scotland's people were subjected to coercive and sometimes violent change, as traditional ways of life were overturned by the 'rational' exploitation of land use. The Scottish Clearances is a superb and highly original account of this sometimes terrible process, which changed the Lowland countryside forever, as it also did, more infamously, the old society of the Highlands. Based on a vast...
Darien
In defiance of the king and in the face of English hostility, the Scottish parliament set out to establish a colony in Central America. This dream of William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England was to end in disaster.
Searching for a Mechanism
Traces the history of cell bioenergetics from the early notions of science in the Enlightenment through to the end of the twentieth century.
The King's Jaunt
From the mock pageantry of the Highlanders to the carefully stage-managed rediscovery of the Scottish Regalia, this trip was a key event in the creation of romantic Scotland. Behind it all lay the great stage manager, Sir Walter Scott. This was the first visit of a British monarch to Scotland for nearly two hundred years, following only two years after the grim horror of the Radical Insurrection, which saw the last armed rebellion in British history when sixty thousand workers went on strike. The Highland clans that Scott called to Edinburgh were, even as they marched, the subjects of eviction and persecution in their homeland. And yet in this stirring blend of pomp and pageantry, Scott was able to override the grim reality of day-to-day life in a surge of support for a monarch and monarchy, even in England, the subject of ridicule and derision. Prebble brilliantly reveals the rotten heart of corruption, betrayal, and intrigue at the heart of the ceremony of this great occasion, and from it all emerges a vision of Scotland that remains with us today.
