I have a soft spot for Bonnie Scotland, and not only because I was a lecturer on the MSc. course in Applied Linguistics in Buccleuch Place at Edinburgh University for a while in the 1980s.

Three Scottish historical figures have fascinated me and entered my fiction: David Roberts (1786-1864), Charles Gordon (1833-1885), and Lady Evelyn Cobbold (1867-1963). They were born well after the Acts of Union in which the Scottish and English Parliaments united to become the Parliament of Great Britain.

During the past few years, the global environmental movement has been undergoing a period of reflection and reckoning, much like other social justice movements.

According to the 2021 Census, 1.4 percent of Scots are Muslim. Most live in Glasgow and other big cities, but they are present in the countryside too, and in the islands and Highlands.

Can you remember the first time you held a melody? Maybe it was on one of those tiny baby keyboards, where you bashed out some notes that inadvertently led to a semi-familiar tune.

The Isle of Skye, situated off the west coast of Scotland, is the largest island of the Inner Hebrides. It is inhabited by approximately 13,000 people.

Since 1966, a regular part of my travels from Scotland to Afghanistan and Pakistan has been the study and enhancement of brown trout, a fish which is native to cold waters from Iceland eastwards to the borders of China.

During the first lockdown in 2020, I lived in an old tenement building on Easter Road in Edinburgh, Scotland. One day, I looked up the distance between my flat and Lochend Park, the nearest green space. 1.126 kilometres.

No public figure in the UK can express old-school leftist politics without being labelled a ‘firebrand’ – a word implying an angry, rabble-rousing nature, which once invoked a person, damned to burn in hell.

William, or Bill, Holmes – otherwise known as Muhammad Ameen – has been in love with rockscapes at least since the start of his eastern journeys in the very early nineteen sixties.