Angus Calder – författare

The author of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is known all over the world as a master storyteller, yet his achievements as a poet have been strangely neglected. This book reveals how much we have been missing. Fascinated by a wide variety of verse techniques, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) produced superb work in styles ranging from folk ballads to witty conversational offerings for his friends. Pieces using Robert Burns's stanza form and dialect rank among the most attractive Scots poetry of the nineteenth century. Angus Calder has brought together many uncollected poems, substantial extracts from the published collections and the complete Child's Garden of Verse (1885), an extraordinarily evocative picture of childhood loneliness, visions and fears. Far more than in his famous novels, it was here that Stevenson felt able to give direct expression to his deepest feelings about friendship, love and nostalgia; this definitive anthology captures a compelling and utterly individual voice.

The Second World War was, for Britain, a 'total war'; no section of society remained untouched by military conscription, air raids, the shipping crisis and the war economy. In this comprehensive and engrossing narrative Angus Calder presents not only the great events and leading figures but also the oddities and banalities of daily life on the Home Front, and in particular the parts played by ordinary people: air raid wardens and Home Guards, factory workers and farmers, housewives and pacifists. Above all this revisionist and important work reveals how, in those six years, the British people came closer to discarding their social conventions than at any time since Cromwell's republic.Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys prize in 1970, The People’s War draws on oral testimony and a mass of neglected social documentation to question the popularised image of national unity in the fight for victory.

The Myth of the Blitz was nurtured at every level of society. It rested upon the assumed invincibility of an island race distinguished by good humour, understatement and the ability to pluck victory from the jaws of defeat by team work, improvisation and muddling through.In fact, in many ways, the Blitz was not like that. Sixty-thousand people were conscientious objectors; a quarter of London's population fled to the country; Churchill and the royal family were booed while touring the aftermath of air-raids; Britain was not bombed into classless democracy.Angus Calder provides a compelling examination of the events of 1940 and 1941 - when Britain 'stood alone' against the Luftwaffe - and of the Myth which sustained her 'finest hour'.

The 3 Estaites is - by common consent - Scotland’s greatest play.First performed in Cupar, Fife in June 1552, it is the earliest Scottish play to have survived. Full of broad humour and pantomime-like farce, it also deals with dangerous topical issues, hitting out at corruption and hypocrisy in the ruling establishment, denouncing the oppression of the poor and calling for social "reformation". A young king is rescued from idle sexual dalliance and false counsels by Divine Correction and they preside over a Parliament summoned to enact just laws, where basic Christian tenets and values are affirmed - but Folly has the last word.In 2000 The 3 Estaites gained a fresh resonance when it celebrated both the Millennium and the rebirth of Scotland’s Parliament by returning to Cupar for the first time in nearly four and a half centuries. This contemporary Scots version by the leading poet and playwright Alan Spence retains the structure and spirit of Lindsay’s script while giving his language a new lease of life. The play’s topical allusions have been updated brilliantly, but Lindsay’s generous spirit and enormous sense of fun have been preserved.This is a national drama, expressing a comprehensive perspective of what Scotland is and what it might be - a land of justice, fellow-feeling and laughter.

The Second World War was, for Britain, a 'total war'; no section of society remained untouched by military conscription, air raids, the shipping crisis and the war economy. In this comprehensive and engrossing narrative Angus Calder presents not only the great events and leading figures but also the oddities and banalities of daily life on the Home Front, and in particular the parts played by ordinary people: air raid wardens and Home Guards, factory workers and farmers, housewives and pacifists. Above all this revisionist and important work reveals how, in those six years, the British people came closer to discarding their social conventions than at any time since Cromwell's republic.Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys prize in 1970, The People’s War draws on oral testimony and a mass of neglected social documentation to question the popularised image of national unity in the fight for victory.

The Myth of the Blitz was nurtured at every level of society. It rested upon the assumed invincibility of an island race distinguished by good humour, understatement and the ability to pluck victory from the jaws of defeat by team work, improvisation and muddling through.In fact, in many ways, the Blitz was not like that. Sixty-thousand people were conscientious objectors; a quarter of London's population fled to the country; Churchill and the royal family were booed while touring the aftermath of air-raids; Britain was not bombed into classless democracy.Angus Calder provides a compelling examination of the events of 1940 and 1941 - when Britain 'stood alone' against the Luftwaffe - and of the Myth which sustained her 'finest hour'.

This is a timely collection of poetry through the ages and throughout the world. Homeric poems, epics and tragedies have been collected from two and a half millennia of literature. Each poem is introduced with a commentary.

The Edinburgh of Angus Calder's poems is not the city of summer tourism and landmark buildings. It is the all-the-year-round arena of lingering mists or brilliant sunlight on grey stone, where seagulls and pigeons command the early-morning streets, curlers sweep their ice at Murrayfield and coarse sportsmen revel on the Meadows.

Explores the culture of Scotland, one of Europe's oldest nations. Bringing together recent writings on Scotland, the book offers a rich mix of social history, cultural observation and a sharp sense of politics. It begins by looking at Scotland in the 18th century. Without resident king or parliament, the nation was effectively a republic and made a unique contribution to European culture. David Hume, Adam Smith and their contemporaries dominated the intellectual scene, while "Ossian", Burns, Scott and Byron launched literary Romanticism. Yet from about 1830, the "republic" began to wither. The railways took Scottish writers to London, brought English MPs to Scottish constituencies and Queen Victoria to Balmoral. Scottish identity became submerged in "British" identity and many began to serve a colonial empire they now regarded as their own. By the 1920s, however, Scotland experienced renewed stirrings of political nationalism. By the 1960s the work of MacDiarmid and Grassic Gibbon had become models for younger Scottish writers seeking "identity" as the British empire clattered to extinction.In 1979, the Labour government offered Scots the chance to vote for an assembly with "devolved" powers, but decreed that a simple majority was insufficient. This traumatic failure to achieve even limited Home Rule led many writers, musicians, artists and historians to declare cultural independence. A second Scottish "republic" came into existence. From his vantage point in the "second republic", the author examines the historical processes and moments that have shaped modern Scotland.