Серия "Canongate Classics"

Caught in the melting pot of social injustice, revolution, war, and pacifism, this powerful book gives a vivid account of the experiences and struggles of a Glasgow family from the First World War and into the Depression at the end of the Twenties. It is a story of Glasgow apprentices, their lives dignified with a desire for art and learning and the ideal of reforming the world. The book follows the fortunes of one particular family, the Macdonnels. The mother dreams of social success while...

Edited and introduced by Andrew Tod. ‘I was born on the 7th May 1797 of a Sunday evening at No. 5 N. side of Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, in my father’s own lately built house and I am the eldest of five children he and my mother raised to maturity.’ Thus opens one of the most famous set of memoirs ever written. Since its first bowdlerised edition in 1898, they have been consistently in print. This is the first ever complete text. Written between 1845 and 1854 the memoirs were...

It is 1978. Corrado Dusa is head of Italy's Christian Democrat Party and the country's Senior Minister. He is also considered to be the key figure in resolving the crisis of dissent and violence that permeates political life. But Dusa has been kidnapped and now his son, Bernardo, a member of a militant extremist group, has disappeared. The press is aghast while the family sense disaster. Can Dusa's release be negotiated? Under what conditions? And – most importantly – with what...

Introduced by Magnus Linklater. Angelo, a private in Mussolini’s ‘ever-glorious’ Italian army, may possess the virtues of love and an engaging innocence but he lacks the gift of courage. However, due to circumstances beyond his control, he ends up fighting not only for Italy but also for the British and German armies. With his patron the Count, the beautiful Lucrezia, the charming Annunziata, and the delightful Major Telfer, Angelo’s fellow characters are drawn with humour, insight and...

Edited and Introduced by Nicolas Barker This book is an autobiographical account of the early years of James McBey, the self-taught boy from a humble north-east village who became one of Scotland's most successful and celebrated artists. Writing with charismatic frankness and realism, McBey describes his passionate desire to be an artist, from his first etchings (printed with the help of an old mangle) to the moment when he left a stultifying job to strike out for Holland to create a...

Edited and Introduced by Anne McKim. This extraordinary poem has been widely popular and influential ever since it was written in the fifteenth century, and its heroic account of the swordfighter Wallace was to symbolise the cause of liberty and independence to many other countries and cultures in the centuries to come. Looking back to the days of the Bruce and the war of independence, Blind Harry’s poem is not an aristocratic tale of chivalry and nobility, but a vivid account of the...

Selected and introduced by Jenni Calder. Ill health drove Robert Louis Stevenson from Scotland; the urge for new and adventurous places drew him to the Pacific. There were those at home who would have been happier to see him purely as a spinner of the picturesque, but Stevenson could not close his eyes to the impact of colonialism, the ‘stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilizations, virtues and crimes’. This collection sets three of his imaginative works —The Bottle Imp, The...