Susan Flockhart

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Latest articles from Susan Flockhart

BOOK REVIEW Has our sanitised approach to death made us less accepting of its inevitability?

In Edinburgh, a hospital-bound cholera van was attacked by a crowd convinced its human cargo was destined to become surgical fodder. Meanwhile, when a new, unconsecrated paupers’ cemetery was created on Paisley’s outskirts, terrified locals dug up graves only to find them devoid of bodies. “The obvious next step,” writes Flanders, “was to attack the cholera hospital itself, where they believed the exhumed dead had been taken for anatomisation.”

Traumatic past of an author who shaped Scottish writing for decades

Carl MacDougall’s impact on Scottish literature was profound. “He may well have had more influence on the Scottish writing scene than any other author,” wrote David Manderson in his Herald obituary, referring not just to MacDougall’s distinguished works, including the novels Stone Over Water and The Lights Below, but to his role as editor, creative writing teacher and former president of Scottish PEN.

Two books which prove birdwatchers are adventurous, audacious daredevils

To the casual observer, nature-watchers can seem a rather timid species. There they go, flitting across meadows with their butterfly nets or skulking silently among the rushes with binoculars trained on some lesser feathered creature. But that image is misplaced, if the intrepid twitchers and lepidopterists who emerge from the pages of two new books are anything to go by.