Day 231. Flying fish and salt horse: a seafaring tale
18th March 1860:Sunday 18th. A mail Boat came close past our ship. Some of the men ashore.
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New acquisitions spotlight: Malory’s History of King Arthur (1634)
The Most Ancient and Famous History of the Renowned Prince Arthur King of Britaine was the last seventeenth-century edition of Thomas Malory’s great medieval prose romance, the Morte Darthur. After […]
Reading the Collections week 6: Insight into the 19th Century Mind
The St Andrews Literary and Philosophical Society was founded in 1838; it was no coincidence that Sir David Brewster was appointed Principal of the United College here in that year. A […]
Reading the Collections, Week 5: Types Of Floral Mechanism
This week’s Reading the Collections gives me the perfect excuse to look at some of the work of one of my favorite botanical illustrators and to take a close look […]
Reading the Collections, Week 4: Siegfried Sassoon, Poems
I am that man who with a luminous look Sits up at night to write a ruminant book. I am that man who with a furrowed frown Thinks harshly of […]
Reading the Collections, Week 3: The Castle of Otranto
As a teenager, I spent much of my time wearing black velvet, listening to the Sisters of Mercy, and writing depressing poetry. At university, I enrolled in classes like “Byron […]
1215 and all that …
So, 2015 is the anniversary year for Magna Carta – 800 years on and the document still has clauses in legal force and has a powerful appeal as ‘a touchstone […]
Reading the collections, week 2: Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) & Catriona (1893)
“Ay, it’s an unco place, the Bass” When I first moved to Scotland, over four years ago, we chose to find a place to live in one of the small […]
Lighting the Past: The Lang Collection
We’re back again, finishing our sixth collection to date: the Lang Collection! After a year-and-a-half of adventuring through the General Reserve Collection (you can read about some of the highlights […]