ROBERT Burns’s father William Burness, a never more than modestly successful tenant farmer of Alloway in Ayrshire, found good friends in the Tennant family of Tennant of Ochiltree, whose senior member John bore the affectionate nickname of Auld Glen.
THE sculptor Sir Eduardo Paolozzi was a son of Edinburgh, born in 1924 to an Italian confectioner and his wife, Alfonso and Carmela. The couple migrated to Scotland in the early 20th century and after their marriage set up a sweet shop off Leith Walk, with the family living in the flat above.
GLAMOUR and gloaming are old Scots words with unique shades of meaning that could never all be translated into standard English. They could only be absorbed intact by the neighbour language, and that was what happened.
ON the early morning of February 27, 1776, a mixed force of regular British soldiers and fierce Highland militiamen resumed their advance up the valley of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina.
THe third US president, Thomas Jefferson is often said to have owed his pre-eminence as a political philosopher in large part to William Small, his Scottish tutor at the College of William and Mary
THE poet Edwin Muir died aged 72 on January 3, 1959. It was a cold and snowy month in Scotland but Muir had in any case retired for good to a village outside Cambridge, where the flat but fertile landscape had nothing in it to remind him of his distant childhood and youth.
THE young Sandy, though still a schoolgirl, tackles without qualms some of
ON January 1, 1800, Robert Owen started a new job. He did so not in the normal manner of other people, during his days and during ours. Owen was going to alter the course of human history. And he knew it.
FEW Scots have become prime minister, and even fewer – a pitiful few, it can be said – have made a success of becoming prime minister. The last in the line of failures, Gordon Brown, followed a long tradition going back to John Stewart, Earl of Bute in 1762-3, the favourite of King George III who was driven from office in a matter of months because the English just could not stand him.
IN modern times we are seeking to free Scotland from its historical reputation for male chauvinism, yet for the women’s side there is a way to go. Scottish women often still have lower status and lower pay at work. It is a legacy of history.
