After the 200-year anniversary of his birth in 2002, this biography brings this genius who called geology the most poetical of all the sciences to a wider audience.

The centrepiece of this book is the autobiographical memoir written by the celebrated Scottish geologist, writer and newspaper editor Hugh Miller from 1829 to 1830. It is, by any standards, a remarkable document from a remarkable man. Vivid and, for its time, unusually informative, it offers a rare insight into the life and thinking of a figure whose violent progress through school in Cromarty and stormy apprenticeship as a stonemason inspired him to seek refuge in the world of letters.

A new and wide-ranging study of Christianity in Scotland, from the eighteenth century to the present.The contributors include D. W. D. Shaw, Ian Campbell, Kenneth Fielding, William Ferguson, Barbara MacHaffie, Peter Matheson, John McCaffrey, Owen Chadwick, David Thompson, Keith Robbins, Andrew Ross, Stewart J. Brown and George Newlands.Topics encompass varieties of unbelief, challenges to the Westminster confession, John Baillie, Queen Victoria and the Church of Scotland, the Scottish ecumenical movement, the disestablishment movement, and Presbyterian-Catholic relations.

This is a new portrait of society and identity in high industrial Britain, focusing on the sea as connector, not barrier. It argues that the port cities and their hinterlands formed a 'floating commonwealth' whose interaction with one another and with nationalist and imperial politics created an intense political and cultural synergy.

The essays collected in this volume offer fresh readings of Dickens's travelogues and novels, often pointing to the many-sidedness of his personality. The 'uncommercial traveller' emerges as an ecumenical John Bull, chary of the alien but greedy of novelty, a man whose incursions on well-trodden or unfamiliar ground are always journeys into the uncanny. Besides dealing with the geography of the novelist's imagination, the book explores numerous 'new worlds' such as the inspiring world of Victorian science and Dickens's responses to it or the world of modern literary theory that shapes our own responses to his work.

This single-volume dictionary presents the lives ofindividual Scottish women from earliest times to the present. Drawing on newscholarship and a wide network of professional and amateur historians, itthrows light on the experience of women from every class and category inScotland and among the worldwide Scottish diaspora.The BiographicalDictionary of Scottish Women is written for the general reading public andfor students of Scottish history and society. It is scholarly in itsapproach to evidence and engaging in the manner of its presentation. Eachentry makes sense of its subject in narrative terms, telling a story ratherthan simply offering information. The book is as enjoyable to read as it iseasy and valuable to consult. It is a unique and important contribution tothe history of women and Scotland.The publisher acknowledges support fromthe Scottish Arts Council and the Scottish Executive Equalities Unit towardsthe publication of this title.

The Highlands Controversy is a rich and perceptive account of the third and last major dispute in nineteenth-century geology stemming from the work of Sir Roderick Murchison. The earlier Devonian and Cambrian-Silurian controversies centered on whether the strata of Devon and Wales should be classified by lithological or paleontological criteria, but the Highlands dispute arose from the difficulties the Scottish Highlands presented to geologists who were just learning to decipher the very complex processes of mountain building and metamorphism. David Oldroyd follows this controversy into the last years of the nineteenth century, as geology was transformed by increasing professionalization and by the development of new field and laboratory techniques. In telling this story, Oldroyd's aim is to analyze how scientific knowledge is constructed within a competitive scientific community—how theory, empirical findings, and social factors interact in the formation of knowledge. Oldroyd uses archival material and his own extensive reconstruction of the nineteenth-century fieldwork in a case study showing how detailed maps and sections made it possible to understand the exceptionally complex geological structure of the Highlands An invaluable addition to the history of geology, The Highlands Controversy also makes important contributions to our understanding of the social and conceptual processes of scientific work, especially in times of heated dispute.

In Bright Particular Stars, David McKie examines the impact of twenty-six remarkable British eccentrics on twenty-six unremarkable British locations. From Broadway in the Cotswolds, where the Victorian bibliomaniac Sir Thomas Phillipps nurtured dreams of possessing every book in the world, to Kilwinning in Scotland, where in 1839 the Earl of Eglinton mounted a tournament that was Renaissance in its extravagance and disastrous in its execution, McKie leads us to places transformed, inspired and sometimes scandalized by the obsessional endeavours of visionary mavericks. Some of McKie's eccentrics, such as Mary Macarthur, who helped the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath win the right to a fair wage in 1910, were good to the point of saintliness; others, including the composer Peter Heseltine, who in the 1920s set net curtains twitching by his hard drinking and naked motorbike riding, rather less so. But together their fascinating stories illuminate some of the most secret and most extraordinary byways of our national and local history. In Bright Particular Stars quiet, unassuming streetscapes become sites of eccentric and uproarious sites of action. The triumphs and failures of the visionaries who thus transformed them - recaptured here by David McKie in vivid and beguiling fashion - have each, in their own way, helped shape our island's rich and chequered history.