Colin Groves – författare

Both comical and horrific, The Three Perils of Woman is essentially a combination of two stories on similar themes. One is set in the Highlands following the Battle of Culloden and the other in Hogg's Edinburgh. Daring in its subject matter, the novel touches on such delicate topics as prostitution and venereal disease.

First published in 1823, Hogg’s powerful novel combines two stories that hauntingly echo each other, one set in Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders in the early 1820s, and the other set in the Highlands in 1746, the time of Culloden and its devastating aftermath. The Three Perils of Woman subversively challenges many of the attitudes and assumptions of the established elite of Hogg’s day, for example by refusing to gloss over what it calls ‘the disgrace of the British annals’, the atrocities committed by the Duke of Cumberland’s victorious army in the Highlands after Culloden. Likewise, in its story of the 1820s Hogg’s novel questions prevailing social attitudes to prostitution and other matters. The Three Perils of Woman had an interested but shocked and hostile reception on its first publication, and this controversial text was omitted from all the nineteenth-century collected editions of Hogg’s works. It remained out of print from the 1820s until its republication in 1995 in the new Stirling / South Carolina edition of Hogg published by Edinburgh University Press, on which the present edition is based. Since 1995 The Three Perils of Woman has come to be seen as a book of outstanding interest and importance.‘Commentators once dismissed Perils of Woman as a bad book because it trampled on the flowerbeds of early-nineteenth-century decorum; they now acclaim it a masterpiece for the very same reason, reading subversive craft in the place of oafishness.’ Ian Duncan, Studies in Hogg and his World‘Both stories [of The Three Perils of Woman] are generically diverse, self-consciously impure. Hogg described them as ‘domestic tales’, apparently soliciting a female readership whose delicacy he then assaults with speculations about promiscuity and prostitution, and with prayers so chattily informal that reviewers found them blasphemous. Both stories modulate suddenly from comedy to tragedy, though one - but which?- struggles throug

Soldiering is a serious, frequently bloody business. That aspect has been documented endlessly. But behind the blood, thunder and de-humanising aspects of conflict are people – people in uniform and people supporting them. All of them have personal feelings and aspirations and they experience the humdrum assortment of daily occurrences that closely match those of their counterparts in civil society. Those aspects of their lives are not widely reported, or appreciated, and it is on those that this book has its focus.‘Life Wasn’t Boring’ relates the life, times, successes, failures and, most importantly, the personal inter-actions and loves of a professional infantry officer and his family, over more than a third of the century that was his service. Some parts are as serious as can be expected of a military account. Other parts might surprise, entertain and even amuse the reader. Together they hold up a mirror to reveal the human side of being a soldier.

The book outlines principal milestones in the evolution of the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere during the last 4 million years in relation with the evolution from primates to the genus Homo – which uniquely mastered the ignition and transfer of fire. The advent of land plants since about 420 million years ago ensued in flammable carbon-rich biosphere interfaced with an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Born on a flammable Earth surface, under increasingly unstable climates descending from the warmer Pliocene into the deepest ice ages of the Pleistocene, human survival depended on both—biological adaptations and cultural evolution, mastering fire as a necessity. This allowed the genus to increase entropy in nature by orders of magnitude. Gathered around camp fires during long nights for hundreds of thousandth of years, captivated by the flickering life-like dance of the flames, humans developed imagination, insights, cravings, fears, premonitions of death and thereby aspiration for immortality, omniscience, omnipotence and the concept of god. Inherent in pantheism was the reverence of the Earth, its rocks and its living creatures, contrasted by the subsequent rise of monotheistic sky-god creeds which regard Earth as but a corridor to heaven. Once the climate stabilized in the early Holocene, since about ~7000 years-ago production of excess food by Neolithic civilization along the Great River Valleys has allowed human imagination and dreams to express themselves through the construction of monuments to immortality. Further to burning large part of the forests, the discovery of combustion and exhumation of carbon from the Earth’s hundreds of millions of years-old fossil biospheres set the stage for an anthropogenic oxidation event, affecting an abrupt shift in state of the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere system. The consequent ongoing extinction equals the past five great mass extinctions of species—constituting a geological event horizon in the history of planetEarth.

The book outlines principal milestones in the evolution of the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere during the last 4 million years in relation with the evolution from primates to the genus Homo – which uniquely mastered the ignition and transfer of fire.