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Kenneth Roys panorama of post-war Scottish life begins with the VE night celebrations in the spring of 1945 and ends with the coming onstream of North Sea oil in the autumn of 1975. It was the formative period in the making of modern Scotland, but it is a period little explored in depth and not fully understood until now. Using a wealth of contemporary accounts, the book tells a complex and often disturbing story of a country riven by poverty, struggling for a sense of its own identity, and ill-served by its masters. The Invisible Spirit is unsparing in its examination of the failings of the Scottish establishment. It delivers a stinging indictment of political complacency and judicial incompetence and shows that, too often, the interests of Scotland and its people were betrayed. It exposes how, time and again, the truth was covered up in order to protect the powerful and how the press acquiescently accepted a far from reliable official version of events. The book is also, however, the story of ordinary lives, the aspirations, the hardships and the achievements of the Scots themselves. Richly varied in mood from the controversial to the amusing, The Invisible Spirit is both entertaining and compelling. It provides a unique perspective on Scotland at a turning point in its long history.

Through most of eight hundred years, Somerled of Argyll has been variously denounced as an intractable rebel against his rightful king and esteemed as the honoured ancestor of the later medieval Lord of the Isles, but he can be recognised now as a much more complex figure of major prominence in twelfth-century Scotland and of truly landmark significance in the long history of the Gael. In this book individual chapters investigate his emergence in the forefront of the Gaelic-Norse aristocracy of the western seaboard, his part in Gaeldoms challenge to the Canmore kings of Scots, his war on the Manx king of the Isles, his importance for the church on Iona, and his extraordinary invasion of the Clyde which was cut short by his violent death at Renfrew in 1164. Perhaps most impressive is the books demonstration of how almost everything that is known of or has been claimed for Somerled reflects the same characteristic fusion of Norse and Celt which binds the cultural roots of Gaeldom. It is this recognition which has led its author to his proposal of Somerleds wider historical importance as the personality who most represents the first fully-fledged emergence of the medieval Celtic-Scandinavian cultural province from which is directly descended the Gaelic Scotland of today.

Philip of Spain is known in England primarily as the husband of Mary I and the adversary of Elizabeth I. The Spanish Armada hangs about his neck like an albatross. He is defined by his brief marriage, his lack of Englishness, his Catholicism, his otherness, and all the additional layers of complication that these bring.Yet Philips life encompasses most of the major struggles and issues of the sixteenth century, as he battled to control the vast Empires acquired by his father, alongside his crippling debts. A complex and private man, Philip dealt with personal tragedy whilst fighting fires across Europe and presiding over a golden era of art, literature and architecture.As the 500th anniversary of Philips birth approaches, Amy Licence places him in his cultural context to confront the black legend; she explores anew his relationship with England and invites us to take a fresh look at the man, the myths and the marriages of Englands forgotten (Tudor-era) king.

In the 1930s, the airship was viewed as the future of transatlantic travel and a brave new era of global connectedness. Germanys safe, fast and efficient airships brought it back into the international fold after its humiliation in World War I. But on May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg airship caught fire in the sky over New Jersey in a blaze that shocked the world and presaged another era of senseless violence.In Shadow Before the Flame, acclaimed historian Catherine Grace Katz uncovers fresh research that unveils the Hindenburg disaster at a pivotal moment in time, coming as it does at the crossroads of the rising tension between fascist Germany and the United States. Katz traces the experiences of a captivating cast of characters: an heiress, a world-renowned acrobat, a German Jew working to save his family from the clutches of Nazism, a young cabin boy on his first voyage with the crew. Meanwhile, on the ground were two intrepid journalists whose reporting on the Hindenburg would invent breaking news as we now know it. In a gripping, ticking-clock narrative, Shadow Before the Flame is a story that begins with the promise of a future made bright by technological innovation and ends with caskets draped in swastikas in New York City.

O desejo de conquista dos romanos moldou o ocidente.Ambição e mitologia alimentando uma sede de poder sem precedentes. Foi nesse cenário de conquistas que um pequeno reino da Península Itálica domino

Witches in medieval fiction were linked with otherworlds heaven, hell or fairyland. By the later sixteenth century, as witchcraft prosecutions gathered pace, fictional witches were connected more firmly to the Devil and to hell. Writers then began undermining this by treating witchcraft as a topic of ridicule; threatening magic was replaced by harmless folklore. This book analyses fictional and imaginative writings about Scottish witches between about 1450 and 1750. It places literary witches in their historical context, comparing them with real people who were prosecuted and executed for witchcraft in this dark period of Scotlands past. It turns out that literary witches are often very different from historical ones: most are comical characters, and some are not even human. The phrase weird sisters, familiar from Shakespeares Macbeth, originated in Scotland, and there is a detailed discussion of the meaning of the phrase and connections between the Scottish play and Scotland itself. Many of Scotlands famous Renaissance poets and dramatists wrote about witches, including William Dunbar, Sir David Lindsay and Alexander Montgomerie, and their work is also explored. By the end of the book, the discussion turns to Robert Burnss Tam o Shanter (1791) in which literary witches are fantasy fiction as they have remained.

Uncover the story of a nations hidden heroes. Throughout Britain, all day, every day and in the dead of night, the secret listeners went about their solitary work. Hands on headphones, these men and women, drawn from all walks of civilian life, listened to the coded messages of German intelligence and passed hundreds of thousands of them on to Bletchley Park. At the same time, men with firearms experience were recruited into secret patrols trained in sabotage and silent killing with knife or garotte. In June 1940, with a full-scale German invasion expected any minute, these auxiliary units were poised to undertake suicidal missions attacking enemy supply lines and assassinating anyone who helped the Nazis. In preparation for this, they dug operational bases in remote and hidden places the ruins of many still exist today and stashed them with supplies and weapons. Alistair Moffat tells the half-forgotten stories of immense bravery by thousands of ordinary men and women. Sworn to secrecy, their heroic work has long been overlooked, yet it played a crucial part in the Allied victory in 1945. This book finally pays them their due.