Notes from the North

embroideries (detail) Guadalupe Maravilla David Talbot Rice (1903-1972) has an Edinburgh art gallery named after him. He was an expert in Byzantine art, appointed to the Gordon Watson chair of Fine Art at Edinburgh University at a young age. Like Giles Henry Robertson, his successor in that post, Talbot Rice went through the English public school system (in his case Eton) to Oxford and into the higher reaches of public office by virtue of the openings those institutions gave him. By all accounts he used his advantages of birth and education well, doing important work in various archaeological sites in Turkey, Iraq and Iran before becoming a professor.   A s well as being an archaeologist and scholar Talbot Rice was an innovator. He introduced a new degree combining Fine Arts and Art History and wanted to establish an arts centre in the university. He died before he achieved the second aim. It was left to Giles Robertson to take the project on and the Talbot Rice gallery was finally...

Edinburgh seems to have gone mad for Christmas although perhaps it feels more unhinged and frantic than usual because the lights and tinsel are in such marked contrast to what we know is happening in other regions of this plundered and war-torn planet. Even the august frontage of the Royal College of Physicians at no 9 Queen Street has decked itself out to look like a landlocked lighthouse  By the late afternoon Princes Street is all but impassable on both sides of the road. The screams from the fair-ground rides echo out far above Walter Scott, sitting impassively in his monument.   As to what Adam Black (1784 – 1874), would have to say about the hordes milling round his statue in Princes Street gardens, snacking on frankfurters and donuts and glugging down lager or warmish red wine … it’s just as well he’s a speechless stone effigy.  Black was a publisher active during the heyday of the Scottish Enlightenment. He bought the copyright of the Encyclopædia Britannica in 18...

I am not the first to wonder why it is that Edinburgh has the largest number of private schools of any UK city other than London and therefore the highest proportion of children educated outside the state system. As a point of comparison Edinburgh (population 515,000) has 17 private schools while Glasgow (population 1.7 million) has 8, none of them boarding. Nationally in Scotland about 4% of all children go to an independent school (7% in the UK as a whole) whereas a startling 25% of Edinburgh children attend private schools.  St Georges School for Girls The cost of doing so is a significant drain on a family’s finances: annual fees in Edinburgh for day pupils can range from £11,000 to £17,000 and for boarders from £26,000 to a little over £37,500. From January 2025 those fees will go up by 20% to cover VAT that the new government will introduce.  The Edinburgh fees are high but still don’t come near the current cost of sending a child to Eton College – approximately £53,00 p...

What is a ritual? The dictionary says it is an act or a ceremony which takes place at a specific date or time and follows a prescribed form or order. It is most often carried out in a group or public setting but not always. So what might turn a repeated act into a ritual I wonder? The question occurs to me because the organisers of the Edinburgh Festival have chosen ‘Rituals that Unite Us’ as the theme for this year’s Festival. Perhaps they mean it as an indirect response to last year’s theme of ‘Where do we go from here?’     Using the dictionary definition, should we call the applause at the end of a show a ritual act? It certainly seems to unite the audience but I don’t think it merits the word ritual. Rituals are more than a practice, more than a habit. They seem to me to have a strong connection to belief, superstition, veneration, propitiation, like the ceremonial lowering of a flag, the sounding of the last post, the blessing of a new baby…    It is true that...

The National Library of Scotland is one of six copyright libraries in the United Kingdom. This means it has a legal right to hold a copy of every book published in Great Britain. There is as a result an almost unimaginably rich hoard of words, images and film stacked, micro-fiched, digitised and filed within its walls on George IV Bridge, at Causewayside where maps are held, and at Kelvin Hall in Glasgow. One of the best known of its many treasures is probably the last letter Mary Queen of Scots wrote, to Henry 3 rd   of France, the brother of her first husband, just six hours before she was beheaded on 8 th   February 1587. One of her final requests to Henry is to make sure her servants are paid, (something he failed to do but which Philip II of Spain put right). one page of Mary's letter To begin with the library was not a public resource. It first opened as the Advocates’ Library in 1689 and it was only with the passing of the copyright Act in 1710 that it began to assume ...

It is May. The blossom is showering down in drifts along the pavements and the air is thick with the twitter of busy birds finding mates and building nests, so Birds their beauty and their wellbeing - our wellbeing too - are the subject of this post.  Scotland apparently has 535 different kinds of bird. If we set aside the views of the owners of grouse moors who often don’t live in Scotland anyway, most of us probably agree that having laws to protect and increase our bird populations is a good thing. And fortunately, notwithstanding the murderous efforts of that gun-wielding minority, Scotland still has more species of large raptors than anywhere else in the UK – 18 in all.  Happily there are also dozens of voluntary organisations up and down the country dedicated to monitoring and protecting the country’s birds and their nesting sites.  Of all the raptors the golden eagle ( aquila chrysaetos ) is probably Scotland’s best known. Another less often seen but widely distri...

Edinburgh Science , founded in 1989, is the educational charity responsible for the Edinburgh Science Festival . This year was the thirty-fifth time the festival has been held, a fortnight of displays, lectures and activities organised to coincide with the school Easter holidays. In 1989 it was the first-ever large-scale public celebration of science and it remains to this day one of the biggest festivals of its kind in Europe. It is without doubt one of Edinburgh’s great successes, and should arguably be as big as the globally-renowned International Festival. But it isn’t, far from it, and perhaps part of the reason for that is a nervousness, even a negativity, in the general population about ‘Science’ in general, a feeling that, unlike the Arts, it is too difficult or too inaccessible.  The festival does an excellent job of dispelling those fears by providing all sorts of ways for people to play and learn.  The hunt is on at the national Museum. of Scotland The title of this...