Scottish Bookshelf
Kenny Macaskill £20 BITEBACK PUBLISHING
The best new releases for your lockdown reading list
Your starter for 10, no conferring: who, in the annals of Scottish history, was Thomas Muir? Second question: why is he commemorated by a 90-feet-tall obelisk on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill?
If your answer to both questions is “I don’t know”, first of all you will be among the great majority of 21st century Scots, and second of all you need this book, the latest and perhaps most insightful work by MP and champion of Scotland’s social conscience, Kenny Macaskill.
It tells how the quietly seething undercurrent of discontent among “the lower orders” of Scottish society was galvanised through the last decade of the 18th century into a campaign for political reform. It began with a heady combination of influences that included the French Revolution, Thomas Paine and Robert Burns, and follows the crushing of the movement by combined forces of “landowning classes” and the heavy-handed deployment of government troops, only for it to arise again with grim consequences in 1820.
Macaskill begins the story with that monument – the Political Martyrs’ Monument erected despite embarrassing establishment opposition in 1844 – then sets about explaining why it is there at all. This he does with some skill and an eye for detail that shows a wider truth.
Thomas Muir was one of the names on the monument, and a leader of the cause. By the time the movement reignited in 1820, the name on the government’s most-wanted list was James Wilson, who, on being sentenced to death, makes one of the great speeches. This book is worth the price for that alone.
Macaskill is carving out a fascinating niche for himself in his choice of subject matter. It is not the ideal political climate, you might think, in which to unfurl a literature of Scottish socialist struggle, but his matter-of-fact style and capacity to challenge his readers to appraise Scotland’s past in terms they can relate to… that is a very handy gift for a writer of any genre.
“Macaskill’s latest and most work” insightful