Exam board: SQA Level: National 5 Subject: English First teaching: September 2017 First exam: Summer 2018 Practice makes permanent. Feel confident and prepared for the SQA National 5 English exam with this two-in-one book, containing practice questions for every question type, plus two full practice papers. - Choose which question types you want to revise: A simple grid enables you to pick particular question styles that you want to focus on, with answers provided at the back of the book - Understand what the examiner is looking for: Clear guidance on how to answer each question type is followed by plenty of questions so you can put the advice into practice, building essential exam skills - Remember more in your exam: Repeated and extended practice will give you a secure knowledge of the key areas of the course (Reading for Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation and Critical Reading) - Familiarise yourself with the exam papers: Both practice papers mirror the language and layout of the real SQA papers; complete them in timed, exam-style conditions to increase your confidence before the exams - Find out how to achieve a better grade: Answers to the practice papers have commentaries for each question, with tips on writing successful answers and avoiding common mistakes Fully up to date with SQA's requirements The questions, mark schemes and guidance in this practice book match the requirements of the revised SQA National 5 English specification for examination from 2018 onwards.

'Attempting no less a task than to demonstrate that Ibsen planned his last twelve plays, beginning with Pillars of Society, as a cycle paralleling exactly Hegel's account of the evolution of the human consciousness, The Phenomenology of Mind, Johnston offers a fresh look at the Norwegian master. Although there is little specific biographical data in support of the author's thesis, he argues compellingly for it in his analysis of the texts themselves. After discussing Hegel's dramatic method of exposition and Ibsen's philosophy, Johnston examines each of the twelve plays in considerable detail. Provocative and sophisticated in its approach, this volume should be widely available to scholars and advanced students of modern drama. ---Library Journal

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Brian Johnston's approach to Ibsen, now well known, is unlike any other. Johnston sees Ibsen's twelve realist plays as a single cyclical work, the "realist" method of which hides a much larger poetic intention than has previously been suspected. He believes that the cycle constitutes one of the major works of the European imagination, comparable in scale to Goethe or Dante. And he has shown Ibsen to be the heir to Romantic and Hegelian art and thought, adapting this heritage to the circumstances of his own day.This work demonstrates how the language and scene, characters and "props," of the Ibsen dramas establish a bold and far-reaching theatrical goal: nothing less than an account of our biological and cultural identity in its multilayered totality. Johnston argues that Ibsen's realist text, while stimulating the appearance of nineteenth-century life, also objectively and precisely builds up an alternative image in which archetypal figures and situations from our cultural past repossess the realist stage. Thus he sees the Ibsen "strategy" in his realist plays as twofold: (1) the dialectical subversion of the nineteenth-century reality presented in the plays, and (2) the forced recovery of the archetypal from the past, in a procedure similar to James Joyce's in Ulysses. By "supertext" Johnston means a reservoir of cultural reference upon which Ibsen continuously drew in his realist work just as in is earlier poetic and historical dramas.

A grounded yet playful collection from an assured poet, flexing his muscles into newer territory. As well as the deep lineage of rural landscapes that populated previous collections, here Johnstone treats us to an extended trip to the circus, where the glitz and thrill of the big top and its stunts are peeled back to allow us into physical and emotional rigour that forms the show's scaffold. Elsewhere poems transport you more literally through film and TV history, around Europe and into the past, again balancing between illusion and the tension that supports it in the more mundane real world. And throughout, the tone and language also plays an ingenious balancing act between the structured, rhyming and informal. This is a personal and expansive collection, honest and exploratory.