The Herald

On This Wild Hebridean Island, a Population of 14 Are Striving to Keep a Community Alive. They'd Love You to Join Them. But Only If You Think You're Hard Enough

Winnie MacKinnon is not too hard to spot on the pier of the Isle of Canna. She is the island's postmistress, doubling as a shorehand when the Loch Nevis ferry docks (she can be seen manoeuvring the heavy gangplank with ease). Every inch an all-round islander, she is also the representative for Canna's owner, the National Trust for Scotland, works in the holiday homes for the same body (there are just three), cleans the tiny primary school (attendance: two) and is a member of the search team f...

Talking Sense; Sue Townsend Can Barely See, but She Still has a Vision for Society. And Despite Her Illness, the Adrian Mole Creator's Mind Is As Sharp As Ever

hilip Larkin - librarian, poet, some-time novelist, critic, jazz aficionado (well, nobody's perfect) and regular writer of stupefyingly reactionary letters - had at times a somewhat jaundiced view of the objects that occupied such a major part of his adult life. "Get stewed," he was once moved to say. "Books are a load of crap." Some years later, Morrissey, another English miserablist of the first order, offered a rather different take on bibliophilia. "There's more to life than books, you kn...

Victoria Victorious; As Part of a (Pounds) 15m Makeover, a Queen Is to Be Restored to Her Home in the East End of Glasgow. Melanie Reid Follows the Epic Story of the Doulton Fountain

You can only wonder what Queen Victoria thinks of it all. There she stands, perched as high as a two-storey block of flats, her expression impassive, imperious; her features refined and idealised by the sculptor. Truly, this stony-faced old queen should be a little amazed, for she has seen greatness turn to decay, neglect, mockery and abandonment. And now this: a restoration so extraordinary that it almost defies description. Within a few weeks, the scaffolding will start to come down on what...

Take It with a Pinch of Salt; When You Make Grand Promises, It Helps to Deliver

Am I the Real Radio fugitive? No. And I don't have (pounds) 10,000 in my pocket either. Sadly. Not that it stops people asking me. Five times on the journey across George Square. It's madness out there, as I remark to no-one in particular. Especially when radio stations are running promotional stunts. Nor, come to think of it, am I being "pampered by everyone from the chef to the cocktail maker". This disappoints me even more than the reaction I get when failing to hand over the radio- statio...

The Third Degree; Richard Demarco: Even at the Age of 74, the Arts Impresario Likes to Marvel at the Joys of Creation and Sleep in the Nude

Who would you be if you could swap places for a day? Any Scottish multimillionaire who is conscious, as I am, that life is short. I would then set about finding ways in which I could help secure the economic stability of the threatened cultural institutions: Scottish Opera for one, and the National Galleries. I would also set up a foundation to ensure that every university had its own state-of-the-art gallery, and another to provide a state-of- the-art building to house the Demarco archives.

Life Lines; No More Secrets, No More Taboos: That's the Pioneering Charity Idea From Scottish Businessman Ali Khan

For Ali Khan, it's all about secrets; or, rather, the lack of them. As a Scottish Muslim who lives in and grew up in Glasgow, he understands the strength of the family bond - yet knows that it can sometimes blight the life of children from ethnic minorities. That is why he has set up Roshni, a pioneering new charity. Roshni, which is Urdu for light, is designed to help ethnic- minority children who have been victims of abuse and feel they have nowhere to turn. Khan says many such children vie...

The Last Word

The List

As food manufacturers unveil plans to slim down snacks, including king-size Snickers and Monster Munch, we list five other things that should be downsized 1Handbags Less room to cart around that plethora of old bus tickets, used tissues and lint-covered mints. Plus: think of the fortune saved in chiropractor's bills. 2 Vernon Kay's airtime That oft-parodied professional-northerner routine is becoming almost unbearable.

O Brothers, Where's Your Art?; Two Decades After They Made Their First Film, Have We Already Seen the Best of the Coen Canon?

It's a fact of life: every wunderkind has to grow up some day. And, with the 20th anniversary of their first film this year, time could finally be catching up on the Coen Brothers, the maverick movie-making duo who, for much of their careers, have been regarded as the wonder boys of American cinema. Ethan and Joel Coen are the inspired minds behind many of the cinematic high points of the past 20 years. Who could forget the sight of John Goodman striding through the flames of the hotel in Bar...

Waiting for Calder; the Iconoclastic Publisher John Calder Returns to Edinburgh, This Time with His Latest Venture, the Godot Company.

When John Calder went to Ireland, he came back with a new theatre company. There they were, he and actor Peter Marinker, shambling into County Sligo to do a bookshop reading of their beloved Samuel Beckett, whom Calder had first published more than half a century before, only to discover they'd turned up on the wrong day. Duly embarrassed, the pair, feeling not unlike a pair of Beckettian wanderers stuck in a limbo not of their own design, sloped off to a local hostelry for a conciliatory Gui...

Cds

Brian Wilson Smile Nonesuch 3/5 IT is not the fashionable view, but the great lost Beach Boys album, Smile, with its symphonic/operatic structure and myth-laden genesis is always going to be more problematic than the classic Pet Sounds. Here it sort of is, though, rerealised by its composer with the superb musicians from his touring band of recent years. Just as Smile was not as much fun live as the Pet Sounds concerts were, so it is on disc. It is not simply that it seems an academic exercis...

Listen Comrades, Shostakovich Fooled You All

ONE of the vexing questions in the political history of music in the second half of the twentieth century is about to return to the agenda. Why did the great Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich voluntarily, and apparently willingly, join the Communist Party in 1961? After all, over a 20-year period he had suffered at the hands of that party: he was publicly denounced, stripped of his posts in Soviet musical society, compelled to endure the banning of much of his music, ostracised for writing ...

The Alessi of His Age; He's Eclipsed by His Contemporaries, but Christopher Dresser Is Finally Being Recognised.

He was born in Glasgow in 1834, the same year as William Morris, whose subsequent reputation as the greatest British designer of the Victorian era was to eclipse his own fame. He was the son - and, indeed, the grandson - of a tax inspector, of modest means and non- conformist Yorkshire stock. He was a child prodigy whose career went into orbit, slumped and quietly rose again. He was a champion of industrial design (perhaps the greatest early example of what we might now call a production desi...

Paradox of the Doctor Who's a Car Salesman

We seem to live in a state of perpetual paradox now. Take the news bulletins of the past few days: the Tory leader, a man of immigrant stock, demands a quota on those wishing, like his ancestors, to improve their lot by settling in this country. Meanwhile, Scotland's first minister seeks to throw wide the doors of welcome to skilled migrants because their "fresh talent" might be the only thing between us and a demographic time bomb, the national infirmity of population decline.

Audio Books

Star of the Sea Joseph O'Connor Random House, (pounds) 14.99 A winter Atlantic crossing is bad enough. Joseph O'Connor, however, traps a microcosm of a fragmenting Ireland on board the Star of the Sea, as it takes its cargo of refugees, rich and poor from Ireland to America. Among the passengers of the Star are Lord David Merridith of Kingscourt, his wife, two children and their nanny, Mary Duane. G Grantley Dixon, a journalist from America, whose memoir forms the basis of this tale, and "the...

The Blurb; a Quick Skim Through the Rest

The Goldfish Bowl: Married to the Prime Minister 1955-1997 Cherie Booth and Cate Haste Chatto & Windus, (pounds) 18.99 You have to ask. Why? What's the point? Why should a woman with a career, a family and a husband in one of the biggest jobs in the world, waste her time writing a soft history book? With all due respect, doesn't she have more important things to do than produce a wives-at-No-10 anthology (of which there are already several)? This is a safe book - safe in the way books are whe...

Hitler and the Halfwit; a Biography Finds a New Place in History for Churchill's Bumbling Cousin. By Harry Reid

Lord Londonderry, the British aristocrat who in the 1930s pathetically tried to befriend Hitler, was not a bad man, but he had plenty of faults. He was vain, ingenuous, insecure (despite his inherited privilege and his many social connections) and a lot less intelligent than he thought he was. He was a blimp, something of a wimp, a fully-paid-up member of the dinosaur class, a grandee with several country houses and a huge mansion in Park Lane where he entertained in a showy manner and mainta...

The Little Ships' Big Adventure

Mimi and Toutou Go Forth Giles Foden Michael Joseph, (pounds) 16.99 As the title implies, this is a book about an awfully big adventure for the men who embarked on an unlikely military operation to wrest strategically-important Lake Tanganyika, in Central Africa, from German control in 1915. It is Foden's fourth work, his first of non-fiction. While opting not to construct a fiction around actual events, he harnesses his skills as a novelist to help bring to life a largely-forgotten episode f...

Warming to the Weirdness in America's Sunshine State

Skinny Dip Carl Hiaasen Bantam, (pounds) 12.99 THERE are but three things in life worth the wait - peace on earth, an end to taxation and a new novel from Carl Hiaasen. The waiting may continue to continue for the first two, but praise the Lord for the written word, the third is available now.

A Flight of Fancy; Philip Roth Asks, What If America's Anti-Semitic Aviation Hero Had Won the Us Election in 1940?

The Plot Against America Philip Roth Jonathan Cape, (pounds) 16.99 THIS is a Roth novel. That is not a statement of the obvious. Roth splits his novels into categories. Thus there are the Zuckerman novels (among them The Ghost Writer and The Anatomy Lesson), the Kepesh books (The Breast, The Professor of Desire, The Dying Animal) and the Roth novels (The Facts, Deception, Patrimony, Operation Shylock and, now, The Plot Against America).