A deep dive into why the aesthetics of a book cover shape our reading experience — and whether that judgement is fair.
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It was a joy to be back at the Edinburgh Filmhouse this week, watching a three-hour Turkish movie and eating a small pack of Jalapeño-and-Jarlsberg flavour popcorn. About Dry Grasses…
Scotland is in the middle of a long, slow media collapse. Newsrooms are shrinking, as is the audience. Social media is awash with influencers boosted by dark money. Public trust…
Our friend Milo in a kilt – a practical garment for hiking, photo Rob Bruce The Scots leid – or language – was given official status in Scotland this week….
Arriving at Pitlochry Theatre with Brad Lewis Cannon and Walter Bruce ON a mild summer evening last week, travelling down from the Highlands by train, I suggested we stop off…
Scotland contributes around £300 million annually to the BBC – a third more than the Scottish Government’s entire culture budget. By law, the BBC is supposed to invest at least…
The Lady of Lismore, the island’s foot ferry Judged against other countries with inhabited islands, Scotland’s ferry service is among the best in the world, something its critics rarely acknowledge….
First published as a Letter from Scotland on Substack, March 18, 2025 The US has made a huge cut in its Overseas Aid budget and the UK has followed suit….
First published Feb 26, 2025 I got the chance to visit Cape Town last week, where I met up with an old friend from Scotland. Sonwabo Masepe taught me African…
First published March 21, 2024, updated March 19, 2025 At an Edinburgh freelance branch NUJ meeting this week, Howard Amos discussed his book Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the…
Energy poverty is when you can’t afford to heat your home or cook your food. Almost a third – 31% – of Scots are in this category, That is more…
Letter from Scotland, published Dec 9, 2024 Paris welcomed world leaders this weekend to celebrate the magnificent rebuild of Notre Dame, completed on a time scale many thought impossible….
Edinburgh for the last couple of days has been at the epicentre of the royal passing – a carefully-planned and tactfully-arranged ceremony. I don’t think I have seen a single…
25 years ago, on September 11, 1997, Scotland voted overwhelmingly for a Scottish Parliament, in a referendum Less than a fortnight before the poll, Princess Diana died in a crash…
ON the western edge of the Sleat peninsula, sometimes called the Isle of Sleat, is Tarskavaig, a scattering of whitewashed cottages looking out across the open sea towards Rum and…
Director-general of the EU translation service. Born: June 11 1937 in Glasgow. Died: April 2 2022 in Bordeaux, aged 84 Brian McCluskey achieved the highest rank of any Scot ever…
Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof is at the heart of Europe’s sleek 21st-century rail network. Trains slide through on several levels, connected by long elevators and glassy lifts. It is a monument to…
Thousands of refugees from Ukraine have been arriving in Berlin – 6,000 estimated today. At the city’s vast central station, the Hauptbahnhof, volunteers awaited the new arrivals, carrying cardboard signs…
There was just one other couple in the cinema at Eden Court in Inverness on a wintry evening in to see Pedro Almodóvar’s “Parallel Mothers”. A spell-binding story, it touches…
To the Highland Press Ball in Inverness this weekend – celebrating local journalism with people from as far afield as Lewrick, as the UK Government likes to call the Shetland…
We are taking advantage of our status as digital nomads to base ourselves in Gran Canaria for most of January. I started off by correcting people who said ‘enjoy your…