Last year I started transcribing a set of letters written as the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715 was brewing. (I still was ‘of the University of Glasgow’ then so that description is accurate in the text of the link that follows!) The advocate Charles Cockburn of Sandybed was the Deputy Keeper of the Signet at this…
My contract on the Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers ends with the sounding of the bells at Hogmanay. So it’s a good time to do my annual catch-up post about the blogs I wrote the project. It’s been a good year with plenty of exciting topics to write about for…
Most of my blogging this year has been related to Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers. We’ve been concentrating on getting as much data as possible into our database before it’s ready for launch next spring. Even so the team managed to post a new blog almost every week that was…
The WS Society is hosting a variety of events this year to celebrate the 200th birthday of its magnificent building in Parliament Square, the Signet Library. The most recent of these was a public lecture by Robert Pirrie WS on ‘Identity, Imagination and George IV in Edinburgh, 1822’ in which he explained how he is…
This post is about something I forgot to mention here when it happened last year. I contributed to the WS Society’s online exhibition, The Great Affair is to Move: Travel and Topography at the Signet Library. This was originally going to be an in-person event in early spring 2020, but had to be cancelled as…
As with last year, my blogging has all been at the Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers My contributions to the Books and Borrowing blog for 2021 can be found here: Seeking the Sublime: Elizabeth Montagu in Scotland, August 1766 A Painted Literary Parthenon for the Athens of the North A…
It has been a busy time for ‘Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers’ since we started in June. We have been liaising with partners, working with digitised records, and adding information to our content management system. We’ve also been publishing a weekly blog to report on our findings and plans. My…
Documents An upgrade by its web host has temporarily made the Stair Society’s website unavailable. The documents for the AGM (annual report and accounts) on 14 November 2020 and the link to Lord Stewart’s pre-recorded lecture are temporarily here. Accounts (pdf) Minutes AGM 2019 (Word) Annual Lecture 2020 “Sir Walter Scott: Law and Imagination” a…
This was always going to be the most intense day of the trip. We would have the morning in Oxford, travel back to London in the afternoon, and catch a train to York in the early evening. But we know Oxford well and we knew what we wanted to do. Breakfast at Browns Cafe (est….
I’m an ex-Londoner and I miss it. I don’t get there as much as I’d like, but I keep an Oyster Card charged with about £5 at all times just in case. On the morning of 7 October 2019, I took my Lothian Buses Ridacard from its place and inserted my Oyster. Ready for the…
