John Prebble – författare

In the terrible aftermath of the moorland battle of Culloden, the Highlanders suffered at the hands of their own clan chiefs. Following his magnificent reconstruction of Culloden, John Prebble recounts how the Highlanders were deserted and then betrayed into famine and poverty. While their chiefs grew rich on meat and wool, the people died of cholera and starvation or, evicted from the glens to make way for sheep, were forced to emigrate to foreign lands. ‘Mr Prebble tells a terrible story excellently. There is little need to search further to explain so much of the sadness and emptiness of the northern Highlands today’ The Times.

'You are hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, and to put all to the sword under seventy.' This was the treacherous and cold-blooded order ruthlessly carried out on 13 February 1692, when the Campbells slaughtered their hosts the MacDonalds at the Massacre of Glencoe. It was a bloody incident which had deep repercussions and was the beginning of the destruction of the Highlanders.John Prebble’s masterly description of the terrible events at Glencoe was praised as ‘Evocative and powerful’ in the Sunday Telegraph.

In the terrible aftermath of the moorland battle of Culloden, the Highlanders suffered at the hands of their own clan chiefs. Following his magnificent reconstruction of Culloden, John Prebble recounts how the Highlanders were deserted and then betrayed into famine and poverty. While their chiefs grew rich on meat and wool, the people died of cholera and starvation or, evicted from the glens to make way for sheep, were forced to emigrate to foreign lands. ‘Mr Prebble tells a terrible story excellently. There is little need to search further to explain so much of the sadness and emptiness of the northern Highlands today’ The Times.

Peter Mitchell, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his chemiosmotic theory, was a highly original scientist who revolutionized our understanding of cellular metabolism and bioenergetics. This is the only full biography of Mitchell, and it should be of considerable interest to biophysicists, biochemists, and physicians and researchers focusing on metabolism, as well as historians of medicine and biology.

Peter Mitchell, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his chemiosmotic theory, was a highly original scientist who revolutionized our understanding of cellular metabolism and bioenergetics. This is the only full biography of Mitchell, and it should be of considerable interest to biophysicists, biochemists, and physicians and researchers focusing on metabolism, as well as historians of medicine and biology.

The word Darien is a scar on the memory of the Scots, and the hurt is still felt even where the cause of the wound is dimly understood. Three hundred years ago the Parliament of Scotland, in one of its last acts before the nation lost its political identity, defied the King and the persistent hostility of the English to establish a noble trading company, to settle a colony, and to recover its people from a century of despair, privation, famine and decay. The site of the colony, Darien on the Isthmus of Panama, was the enduring dream of William Paterson, the erratically brilliant Scot who had helped to found the Bank of England. He called it 'the door of the seas, and the key of the universe', and believed that it would become a bridge between East and West, an entrepot through which would pass the richest trade in the world. The first attempt to make the Company a joint Scots and English venture was crushed by the English Parliament. The Scots created it by themselves, in a wave of almost hysterical enthusiasm, subscribing half of the nation's capital. Three years later the 'noble undertaking', crippled by the quarrelsome stupidity of its leaders, deliberately obstructed by the English Government, and opposed in arms by Spain, had ended in stunning disaster. Nine fine ships owned by the Company had been sunk, burnt or abandoned. Over two thousand men, women and children who went to the fever-ridden colony never returned. It was a tragic curtain to the last act of Scotland's independence. John Prebble's book is the first detailed account of the Darien Settlement, drawn from original sources in the records of the Company, the journals, letters and memoirs of those who tried to turn William Paterson's dream into reality.

'A tale of irresponsibility and inexperience' THE TIMES'Graphically written with a sense of dramatic construction' SCOTSMANOn December 28th 1879, the night of the Great Storm, the Tay Bridge collapsed, along with the train that was crossing, and everyone on board...This is the true story of that disastrous night, told from multiple viewpoints:The station master waiting for the train to arrive - who sees the approaching lights simply vanish.The bored young boys watching from their bedroom window who witness the disaster.The dreamer who designed the bridge which eventually destroyed him.The old highlanders who professed the bridge doomed from the outset.The young woman on the ill-fated train, carrying a love letter from the man she hoped to marry...THE HIGH GIRDERS is a vivid, dramatic reconstruction of the ill-omened man-made catastrophe of the Tay Bridge disaster - and its grim aftermath.