Welcome to The Scotsman Sessions

With performing arts activity curtailed for the foreseeable future, we are commissioning a series of short video performances from artists all around the country and releasing them on scotsman. com, with introductions by our critics.

Highlights so far include:

♦ KT Tunstall performing her new song, Anything At All, from her home in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles

♦ Scotland’s Makar Jackie Kay reading two lockdown poems, Still and Mask

♦ Tam Dean Burn tackling the subject of Scotland’s salmon farming industry in an excerpt from his show Aquaculture Flagshipwreck

♦ Scottish Chamber Orchestra cellist Su-a Lee playing Dvořák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me in a forest near Grantown-on-spey

To watch, visit www.scotsman.com/arts-andculture

the same quotes from authoritative figures; it is also marred by strikingly poor proof-reading, in a text riddled with minor grammatical errors, missing words and malapropisms.

Yet if his argument might have been better presented as a well-edited long pamphlet, rather than a book that bears all the marks of overhasty production, it still benefits greatlyfromgethins’ experience of the UK and Scottish presence on the international stage; and from his insight into Scotland’s huge potential to play a bridge-building role among the north European family of nations, whether we do so as an independent country, or as a nation within a nation, using what powers we can to continue to make our presence felt, and to contribute to the building of a future world based on co-operation rather than conflict, and on hope and creativity, rather than on deepening environmental crisis, destruction and fear.