In the second part of the twentieth century there began to be a marked increase in the number of reference books available in bookshops. No longer was the reference library of the average fairly educated household restricted to one dictionary, probably dog-eared and several decades old, one out-dated copy of Roget's Thesaurus, either much-thumbed or pristine, according to the needs of the household, and possibly an old copy of Fowler's English Usage. This increased interest in reference publishing started with dictionaries and a great variety of these, in various shapes and sizes, began to be made available to the public. This sparked off an interest in other kinds of reference books. Existing ones began to be regularly updated and a whole deluge of new ones appeared. These included thesauruses, guides to good usage, guides to good grammar, guides to correct spelling, hints on how to improve your writing, books of idioms and so on.
This little book celebrates everything that is finest about the 'Lion in the North'. It is packed with hundreds of examples of Scottish wit and wisdom, it praises the country of tartan and tatties, Burns Nicht and bagpipes, Sir William Wallace and Robert Louis Stevenson.
The 'land of the mountain and the floor', of tartan and tatties, Burns Nicht and bagpipes, is also the land that has spawned writers and poets, statesmen and philosophers, commentators and wits as diverse as William MacGonagall and Hugh MacDiarmid, Sir Walter Scott and Billy Connolly, Arthur Balfour and Muriel Gray, Sir William Wallace...
Scotland has long had a romantic appeal which has tended to be focused on a few over-dramatized personalities or events, notably Mary Queen of Scots, Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Highland Clearances-the failures and the sad - though more positively, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce have also got in on the act, because of their heroism in resisting English aggression. This has had its own satisfaction, and has certainly been very good for the tourist industry. But, fuelled by the explosion of serious academic studies in the last half-century, there has grown up a keen desire for a better-informed and more satisfying understanding of the Scottish past-and not only in Scotland.
