Angus Campbell Boeken

Vividly evoked Scottish tale of chance encounters and of family memories, regret, love and loss.

Dominico Caracciolo was an important figure on the eighteenth-century European stage, holding high office as a diplomat in London, Turin and Paris, and as viceroy and prime minister in the Two Sicilies. He was an inveterate letter-writer and his huge correspondence, with his diplomatic despatches and other official writing, is a unique original source, providing a detailed and vivid picture of the eighteenth-century European elite with all its extravagance and scandalous behaviour but, even more importantly, it is an account of an Enlightenment struggle against the increasingly outdated clerical and feudal rule in Sicily. Caracciolo was an abrasive and combative official and politician and vigorous scion of the Enlightenment. In this book, Angus Campbell provides a detailed portrait of Caracciolo and of the political, social, economic, legal and cultural context in which he lived and worked. In doing so, he provides a unique vantage point on the European diplomatic culture of the eighteenth century.

After finally acknowledging to himself that he is an a hopeless rut, Archie decides to set off on a quest for knowledge and self-improvement as he seeks the source of the North Wind.

When his enquiry turns personal he's forced to ask whether his ownlife is an artificial mask. It fuses the glass and steel of our increasingly controlledalgorithmic world with the memory and straw of our forebears' worldcontrolled by traditions and taboos, the seasons and the elements.

‘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 it was, and is, to grow up amid family, neighbours and surroundings of a sort providing, for the most part, both security and happiness.’  JAMES HUNTER

A precious golden souvenir has disappered from Kismuil Castle in the Island of Barra. Murdo set outs to find who dunnit. Help comes from smart officers from the mainland, whose most difficult challenge is Murdo himself. PC Murdo would find himself at home in both Whisky Galore and in Para Handy.