December 19, 2008

Tartan Blogging

A reader notices an absence of blogging on the subject and asks: "What's happening in Scotland?"

Answer: Bugger all.

19 Dec 2008 19:31:20 | Scotland

1 Comment

Mmm...that's good whisky!

Yup, nothing like the year 2008 to emphasise the true scale of the Scottish Parliament.

Posted by: Mmm...that's good whisky! | December 20, 2008 at 11:46 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
The Cruiser Goes Down Conor Cruise O'Brien's death, at 91, comes as a jolt. By the end, the Cruiser was something of a reactionary (his hostility to nationalism had led him to embrace Bob Macartney's UK Unionist Party) but that shouldn't detract from his achievements as a historian (especially his books on Parnell and Burke), journalist and public intellectual. Most of all, however, his death reminds one of how completely Ireland has changed in the past 20 years. The Cruiser's battles with Charlie Haughey (he was right about Haughey years before the full extent of the former Taoiseach's crookedness became widely apparent) and his fulminations on the national question have a certain antiquated feel now that the issue has, for the time being at least, been settled. Nonetheless, O'Brien played a leading role in dragging Irish opinion away from a cosy, soft-hearted, sentimental nationalism that tacitly endorsed the Republican movement's aims, if not necessarily its methods. In that sense, he did the Irish State great service. In my time at TCD he still used to turn up, from time to time, to the College Historical Society but even then one had the sense that the Society's Patron (as he was) no longer quite understood...
PREVIOUS POST
Alternative Titles As mentioned in this post on the best newspaper corrections of the year, the Guardian acknowledged that Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude not, as the paper suggested, One Hundred Years of Solicitude. A shame, really, since this latter would seem a more entertaining, lively read. In that spirit, readers are invited to suggest similarly altered titles for novels or movies that would be more amusing, more interesting or simply more suggestive than those chosen by the artists themselves.

alex massie

Search

My Online Status

Recent Comments