Henrietta Liston, wife of a British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, recorded her travels in a private journal, now held in the National Library of Scotland. Together with academics from Bilkent University in Ankara, the Library is currently working to publish the journal...

Donald Dewar became Scotland’s First Minister in 1999, the year of the Official Opening of Scotland’s new Parliament and almost 300 years after the previous Parliament came to an end with the Treaty and Act of Union. His historic speech on that occasion included the words: ‘The past is part...

The National Library of Scotland will shortly open a major new exhibition on the Scottish Enlightenment. Robert Betteridge, Rare Books Curator (Eighteenth-Century Printed Collections), considers how best to capture the essence of this remarkable era.

The second round of the Emerging Critics mentoring programme is now complete. Working in partnership with Creative Scotland, the Scottish Review of Books produced a 10 month course, through which sixteen aspiring critics were given the opportunity to access mentoring from some of Scotland’s leading...

The tenth Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has been awarded to Robin Robertson. Robertson becomes both the first Scot and the first poet to win the £25,000 Prize.  His 200+ page book The Long Take is written in a combination of verse and prose, echoing the format often used by Sir Walter...

With only two days to go until the opening of this year’s Borders Book Festival in Melrose  the organisers must have everything crossed for a dry weekend. Trains will no doubt be full on the Borders Railway line – especially on the Saturday afternoon when crowds will flock not only to the Book...

The following is taken from a talk given by Kirsty Gunn at Mansfield College, Oxford, as part of the Oxford Literary festival. 

Catch-22, the greatest and funniest war novel ever written, has been made into a miniseries by George Clooney. Alan Taylor recalls an unforgettable encounter with its author, Joseph Heller, at his home on Long Island. This article first appeared in the Herald on Sunday.

WAITING for exam results can scar you for life. I have a friend who, 50 years on, still has nightmares about her Highers. Others, like me, remember the hollow feeling as the letter landed on the doormat, within which lay our university degree. This mental torment, however, is as nothing to the agony...