Comment & Debate

• There's nothing wrong with young bookworms
  28 June 2014

  Doctors dub bookish children as mentally ill" ran the newspaper headline.

• 10 books to mark
  19 June 2014

  June 23-24th marks the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, in which Robert the Bruce's army routed the English.

• End of a chapter at new-look library
  14 June 2014

  Over the past year or so I've had to give more talks than is good for me, at book festivals and in libraries and wherever else there was felt a need for a discussion of the Battle of Flodden.

• Creative Scotland review must tread carefully
  7 June 2014

  Creative Scotland has announced it is to launch a review of the literature sector, and invites tenders from contractors wishing to undertake this process (closing date June 13).

• 10 books to mark
  5 June 2014

  Today is the anniversary of the shooting of Senator Robert Kennedy, in 1968.

• If everyone's a critic, where are the experts?
  31 May 2014

  Earlier this month, American literary critic Michael Dirda - who reviews for the Washington Post - wrote a column in the Times Literary Supplement about the woes of the newspaper book reviewer.

• The vile message of women crime writers
  24 May 2014

  Acursory glance at headlines over the past few months shows that a depressing, sometimes alarming, degree of misogyny and abuse still blights British society.

• Sunset Song cast a long shadow on Grassic Gibbon's home village
  17 May 2014

  It has gone down in literary history as one of the most fortuitous moments of madness.