'In pencil-written and drawing-spattered notebooks intended for her Australian granddaughter, an elderly woman, now in Edinburgh, remembers and relives her Hebridean childhood. The community thus recreated is one where modernity – its emblem the Electricity of Angus Peter Campbell's title – collides and overlaps with all sorts of linguistic, cultural and other continuities. But this is no sentimental or elegiac excursion into a long-gone past. What's evoked here is a powerful sense of what...

A face is nothing without its history.Gavin and Emma live in Manhattan. She's a musician. He works in Artificial Intelligence. He's good at his job. Scarily good. He's researching human features to make more realistic mask-bots - non-human 'carers' for elderly people. When his enquiry turns personal he's forced to ask whether his own life is an artificial mask.Delving into family stories and his roots in the Highlands of Scotland, he embarks on a quest to discover his own t...

A precious golden souvinier has disappered from Kismuil Castle in the Island of Barra. The historic brooch was given as a gift by the Chief of Clanranald to MacNeil of Barra in the 16th century. Or perhaps it was treasure found from a shipwrecked galleon from the Spanish Armada... The local constable, P.C. Murdo set outs to find who dunnit. He has seven suspects, but in his search for the truth of the theft discovers that suspicion and prejudice make poor detectives. Help comes from smart ...

I loved her from the moment I saw her, and that love has never wavered. It has encased every choice I have ever made, and I have never done anything in my life which didn't involve her image somewhere… I'm so sorry for it all This is the latest English-language novel from award-winning Gaelic poet, novelist, journalist, broadcaster and actor, Angus Peter Campbell, and the first to be published simultaneously in Gaelic and English. Vividly evoked Scottish tale of chance encounters and of fa...

Archie genuinely believes the old legends he was told as a child. Growing up on a small island of the Scottish coast and sheltered from the rest of the world, despite all the knowledge he gains as an adult, he still believes in the underlying truth of these stories. After years of unemployment, to escape his selfish wife and to stop the North Wind from blowing so harshly in winter, Archie leaves home to find the hole where the North Wind originates. Funny, original and very moving, Archie ...

'They say he brought back some Spanish gold and others say he didn't bring anything except the rags he was wearing but had the power to turn stone into gold and that the two stories somehow got mixed up.' Did Olghair MacKenzie steal alchemical secrets from the Egyptians? Or was he a rebel pirate who found refuge on a small Scottish island after the Armada? Does his treasure still lie hidden there? Six hundred years after MacKenzie's death, an ex-footballer returns to the island where he sp...

Should philosophers, on occasion, be embarrassed in their work? Were they? We look at some cases in the history of modern philosophy and study the grounds for embarrassment and the way philosophers have dealt with it. Hume and Wittgenstein are our prime examples of philosophers who were aware that through their work, they had undermined the very possibility of doing such work—that the aims of traditional philosophy are out of reach—and thus have been thoroughly embarrassed. What are the up...

Recent years have seen the increasing valuation and promotion of ‘creativity’. Future success, we are often assured, will rest on the creativity of our endeavours, often aligned specifically with ‘cultural’ activity. This book considers the emergence and persistence of this pattern, particularly with regards to cultural policy, and examines the methods and evidence deployed to make the case for art, culture and the creative industries. The origins of current practices are considered, as is...

Perhaps Donald Michael MacDonald invented the round mile, all 2,240 yards of it. Donald and his seven cows, walking the same steps each day through the past and the future, the fairy knoll and the poison pool, the eternal truths and the unknowable possibilities. Rarely does Donald venture beyond the round mile, for he has no need to: all of history can be found on his land. Yet the wind farms, the spaceport, and the American billionaire with his Big House all threaten the peace Donald has ...

Trinacria, the ancient name for Sicily extending back to Homeric Greek, has understandably been the focus of decades of archaeological research. Recognizing Sicily’s rich prehistory and pivotal role in the history of the Mediterranean, Sebastiano Tusa - professor, head of heritage agencies and councillor for Cultural Heritage for the Sicilian Region - promoted the exploration of the island’s heritage through international collaboration. His decades of fostering research initiatives not onl...

After the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army considered counterinsurgency (COIN) a mistake to be avoided. Many found it surprising, then, when setbacks in recent conflicts led the same army to adopt a COIN doctrine. Scholarly debates have primarily employed existing theories of military bureaucracy or culture to explain the army’s re-embrace of COIN, but Peter Campbell advances a unique argument centering on military realism to explain the complex evolution of army doctrinal thinking from 1960 to ...

We live in disturbed times. Seemingly more now than at any time in the previous five decades, the planet appears riven. Against this troubling global background, An Impossible Dream traces author Peter Campbells six-week, eight-hundred-kilometre long walk along the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain, capturing what he saw and what he felt during the journey.Using the Camino as a backdrop, Campbell looks back at the cultural and religious conflicts of the Iberian Peni...