The Conquered was young Naomi Mitchison's first novel, published in 1923, just five years after the end of the First World War, in 1918. Mitchison chose to write about wars, but about historic ones, Julius Caesar's bloody and gradual conquest of Gaul. Instead of Caesar's serene lists of victories and setbacks, we have the impact of these wars on her Gallic hero Meromic. Profound and traumatic. From being heir to a proud tribe, the Veneti, he becomes by turns a slave, a revenge killer, a wanted man - and a slave again, with a severed right hand, a man looking to end it all. But his life was remediably complicated by his loyalty to and affection for Titus Barrus, the Roman who bought him, and treated him as man, not brute. His conflicts of loyalties are powerfully central. Mitchison was conscious that after the Great War there was still fighting in Ireland. Just as her natural and immediate sympathies were for the Gauls under Vercingetorix fighting the Roman giant, we are shown her own contemporary sympathies were with the Irish against the might of the British Empire. With an Introduction by Isobel Murray.

`Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!' A powerful poem of universal guilt and a protest against capital punishment, The Ballad of Reading Gaol is Wilde's best-known poem, yet it is quite unlike the rest of his poetry. At Oxford Wilde discarded the passion and politics of his mother's Irish nationalistic anti-famine poetry and opted to follow an English Romantic tradition, paying tribute to Keats, Swinburne, and the Pre-Raphaelites. Admiration of French masters gradually led to his writing Impressionist, even decadent poems and his collection Poems (1881) brought accusations of obscenity and plagiarism as well as scathing reviews. Unabashed, Wilde revised and reprinted his final `Author's Edition' in 1892, by which time he was the successful author of fiction, criticism, and Lady Windermere's Fan. This volume follows as closely as possible the chronological order of composition, highlighting autobiographical elements including the young Wilde's conflicting attitudes to Greece and Rome, pagan and Christian, and his fluctuating attraction to Roman Catholicism. The Appendix shows Wilde's original ordering, constructed with great care around a `musical' arrangement of themes. The poems reveal unexpected aspects of a literary chameleon usually identified with sparkling wit and social comedy. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This authoritative edition was formerly published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Wilde's poetry and prose short stories, plays, critical dialogues and his only novel - to give the essence of his work and thinking. Oscar Wilde's dramatic private life has sometimes threatened to overshadow his great literary achievements. His talent was prodigious: the author of brilliant social comedies, fairy stories, critical dialogues, poems, and a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In addition to Dorian Gray, this volume represents all these genres, including such works as Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, 'The Happy Prince', 'The Critic as Artist', and 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Early in Orcadia was first published in 1987, and consists of five stories, set hundreds of years apart in time and dealing with different characters, but connected by their location in a particular corner of Orkney during the period known as the Stone Age. Mitchison links them formally by interpolating passages of fact and explanation between the fictional episodes, and by speculating in her own voice about what happened in prehistory, as far as it can be known from archaeological research, and how it fits in with the world of today. The slightly awkward jumps from one story to the next indicate that the development of the human race was not a completely smooth and seamless process. There must have been significant moments when a highly important discovery or invention took place. The structure of the book is demonstrating its theme - that there are sudden advances but just one story running from the earliest times to the present day, and it is the story of humankind. From the Introduction.

"The Year of the Short Corn" was first published in 1949, and the war, or its immediate aftermath, forms a presence in most of the stories. It can be a civilian family gathered together with scattered serving children for a precious Christmas leave, or a son or daughter returning from one of the services; it can illustrate clothes rationing, and the avid fervour with which civilian women greet silk stockings; it can be a 'townser' who thinks too much of himself who becomes snowbound on a North East farm, or the rage and humiliation of a young castrated ox. It can even be an Edinburgh boarding-house with a kenspeckle crew of lodgers (and an oversexed bulldog), under the eyes of a bewildered refugee girl from Vienna. Fred Urquhart was praised by George Orwell for the striking variety of his subject matter, and by others for his splendid dialogue, and his portraits of characters, especially women. None of these critics was wrong, but there is more here to praise!

This is Naomi Mitchison's least successful novel, and new readers should not start here! It is shaped by her own life and fears in her own experience in 1931, and is the first of her novels and stories not to have a historical setting. Mitchison was appalled by the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, and wanted to warn the world. She was rather dismayed by the results of the Russian Revolution, of which she had once had great hopes. She also poured all her most personal feelings into the novel, and covered a plethora of subjects - not only free love, abortion and rape, but the unmentionable discussion of marital infidelity, trouser buttons and rubber goods. Her own love life was so complex that she divided it between two sisters in the novel! It spent two years being censored by the publisher while she championed it, but it was crowded, over-written, hectic and unbalanced. It is poor, but Mitchison-lovers will find it impossible to put down. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen

By 1937, many people, both employed and unemployed, were anticipating war, but from 1939 they were all thrust into it. Fred Urquhart's second collection of short stories reflects this. The young men are often reluctant to sign up for the Forces: the world seems on the move. Tenement dwellers react to the mysteries of Blackout, sirens, air-raids, air-raid shelters. Urquhart's stories reflect all this in robust and often comic fashion. The longest, 'The Laundry Girl and the Pole', concerns one of his favourite subjects, the transformation that foreign soldiers could bring to local girls, relatively starved of freedom, in the exciting new Blackout. Wild nights in the chip shop! Language ceases to be the major problem. Sudden brief romances become the risky order of the day. red Urquhart (1912-1995) was born in Edinburgh and spent much of his childhood there, where his grandparents lived, and later he worked in an Edinburgh book shop for some years ('my university'). He is best known as a superb short story writer. When he began to write it was the heyday of short story magazines, and this was the only obvious way to earn a living as an author. He spent the war in the north-east of Scotland, a conscientious objector relegated to farm work: his stories of this are agreed to rival Grassic Gibbon and Jessie Kesson. But later he went to London, finding the louche world of Soho more to his taste than Edinburgh correctness. Later he lived in the country in a 'happy homosexual marriage' and he did not return to Scotland until 1991, after his partner's death. The Ferret Was Abraham's Daughter (1949) and Jezebel's Dust (1951) are his two great novels of Edinburgh's poorer citizens in wartime. sobel Murray is Emeritus Professor in Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen. Recent publications include new editions of Naomi Mitchison and Jessie Kesson, and Scottish Novels of the Second World War, which has chapters on them, on Urquhart, and Linklater, Jenkins, Spark, Hood and Mackay Brown, as well as a new edition of her biography, Jessie Kesson: Writing Her Life.

The scene is Edinburgh, 1939. Lives are about to change. Blackout, bomb shelters, cinemas, dance halls, all call out to the girls and young women that life need not be dull. This book, set in one of the poorer areas, is full of the comedy and extraordinary dialogue for which Fred Urquhart is well known, and the Hipkiss family and its neighbours are foregrounded. But central is the imagination of young Bessie Hipkiss, aged fourteen, only just too old to be evacuated. Bessie's fantasy life as a princess of an exiled French Royal Family contrasts with the disappointing ordinariness of everyday, until she meets Lily McGillivray, only six months older, but already with peroxide and men on her mind. But when Bessie's mother dies her father expects her to raise the family. Life changes. Fred Urquhart (1912-1995) was born in Edinburgh and spent much of his childhood there, where his grandparents lived, and later he worked in an Edinburgh book shop for some years ('my university'). He is best known as a superb short story writer. When he began to write it was the heyday of short story magazines, and this was the only obvious way to earn a living as an author. He spent the war in the north-east of Scotland, a conscientious objector relegated to farm work: his stories of this are agreed to rival Grassic Gibbon and Jessie Kesson. But later he went to London, finding the louche world of Soho more to his taste than Edinburgh correctness. Later he lived in the country in a 'happy homosexual marriage' and he did not return to Scotland until 1991, after his partner's death. "The Ferret Was Abraham's Daughter" (1949) and "Jezebel's Dust" (1951) are his two great novels of Edinburgh's poorer citizens in wartime. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor in Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen. Recent publications include new editions of Naomi Mitchison and Jessie Kesson, and "Scottish Novels of the Second World War", which has chapters on them, on Urquhart, and Linklater, Jenkins, Spark, Hood and Mackay Brown, as well as a new edition of her biography, "Jessie Kesson: Writing Her Life."

The Delicate Fire illustrates a fundamental change in Naomi Mitchison's work. The early stories are set in ancient Greece, like many before them. But here Mitchison effectively says farewell to that setting with accounts of the worlds of Sappho and 'Lovely Mantinea'. By the end, she seems wholly turned to the twentieth century - a new departure for her - tackling subjects such as the General Strike of 1926 and contemporaneous Hunger marches, and battles against censorship. This shift marks her politicisation, her growing fear of fascism, but more personally also the end of her long affair with a distinguished scholar of the ancient world. She turns away from Greece for good. She turns to the present, and will spend the thirties warning against fascism. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen

Jessie Kesson is forever associated with her first novel, the fictionalised autobiography of her early years, The White Bird Passes. Born illegitimate in a Workhouse and raised in an Elgin slum, she was removed from her beloved but neglectful mother and sent to an orphanage in Kirkton of Skene. There she throve and shone, but was refused any chance of higher education, and ended up a year in a mental hospital. After marriage, she became a cottar wife around North East Scotland, before moving to London, where she combined writing novels and radio plays with jobs from cleaning a cinema to producing Woman's Hour. The first edition of her authorised biography won the National Library of Scotland/Saltire Research Book of the Year in 2000. It revealed an extraordinary woman making her life and art out of all life threw at her, overcoming and transforming it all. This second edition at last reveals the truth about her ever-absent father, here named. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor in Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen, currently working on Kesson, Naomi Mitchison and Fred Urquhart.

Naomi Mitchison began her novel-writing career in the 1920s, with historical fictions set in the Ancient world, in Roman and Greek civilisations, and soon won a high reputation world-wide. But she began to move toward present and future as well as past: thus Lobsters on the Agenda (1952) dealt with contemporary Highland life. When in her sixties she began a lasting friendship with a young chief designate of the Bakgatla tribe, Linchwe, she went on to join the tribe, and was adopted as its Mother. She wrote only one adult novel about Botswana, When We Become Men (1965). This fine novel deals with the contemporary fight for equality across southern Africa, and the struggle against apartheid. It ends up projecting towards a future where fighting would be unnecessary. Her main character here is Isaac, a young man brought up in Pretoria, who believes in resistance to a white minority government, and, like Nelson Mandela, backs bloodless sabotage as a political weapon. He deeply distrusts the remnants of the tribal system, and the power of the chiefs. He meets Letlotse, young heir apparent to the Bakgatla, returning home from an expensive but sometimes bizarre or just irrelevant education in Britain. He distrusts old ways too, and is tempted towards national politics, away from the tribe. There are clashes of beliefs, and conflicting ideas and loyalties. There is violence here. There are rapes and murders, and some killings that the Africans regard rather as executions. Here is a vivid, clear account of a troubled people in transition, which helps the reader to understand and empathise with the birth-pangs of a new, post-Imperial, Africa. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen

Naomi Mitchison, daughter of a distinguished scientist, sister of geneticist J B S Haldane, was always interested in the sciences, especially genetics. Her novels did not tend to demonstrate this, and she did not publish a Science Fiction novel until almost forty years into her fiction-writing career. Isobel Murray's Introduction here argues that it is by no means 'pure' Science Fiction: the success of the novel depends not only on the extraordinarily variety of life forms its heroine encounters and attempts to communicate with on different worlds: she is also a very credible human, or Terran, with recognisibly human emotions and a dramatic emotional life. This novel works effectively for readers who usually eschew the genre and prefer more traditional narratives. Explorers like Mary are an elite class who consider curiosity to be Terrans' supreme gift, and in the novel she more than once takes risks that may destroy her life. Her voice, as she records her adventures and experiments, is individual, attractive and memorable. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.

Ancient Greek history and politics fascinated Naomi Mitchison, and in particular the long antagonism or rivalry of Athens and Sparta. In this, her second novel, she investigates the two city states through Alxenor, a young man from the tiny island of Poieessa, which changes hands as the balance of power changes. He does not choose his loyalty in a theoretical way, but as he experiences rough treatment from both. By Alxenor's day, Athens had declined from the golden age of Perikles, and the city was prone to bully smaller entities, but he is forced to recognise the much worse reality of Spartan civilisation, with iron discipline, cruelty and loss of individuality. Eventually, Mitchison came to see even the twentieth century in terms of struggles between Athens and Sparta, democracy and totalitarianism. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.

Anna Comnena is described as the first female historian, the author of her father's celebratory biography. She was an educated princess in eleventh-century Constantinople, the daughter of the Emperor Alexius. She was expected to succeed him, and raised as heir, but her hopes were dashed by the birth of a younger brother. In what is over-modestly described as a biography, Naomi Mitchison combines her story with that of her father, and the whole civilisation of the Eastern Empire, indeed the whole known world of the time. The Eastern Empire is seen as a necessary bulwark between a young and promising Europe and the perils of Islam and wild tribes in Asia. Mitchison also warns her readership of the perils of a dead civilisation, and writing in 1928 she poses a challenge to the direction of Europe in these perilous postwar years. Thwarted ambition at last drove Anna to attempt to kill her brother, who, says Mitchison, went on to be one of the best of Emperors. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.

Eschewing Plutarch and Shakespeare's tale of Mark Antony's fatal romance, Naomi Mitchison's 'Cleopatra's People' starts with the next generation, with the children of the Queen and of Charmian, one of her 'mates'. The impact of Cleopatra's life and personality is reflected through them, and their efforts to follow in her wake.

This is the first volume in a series begun by Isobel Murray and Bob Tait in 1984, and finished in 2008 Authors covered in other volumes include: 2. Iain Banks, Bernard MacLaverty, Naomi Mitchison, Iain Crichton Smith,Alan Spence. 3. Janice Galloway, John Herdman, Robin Jenkins, Joan Lingard, Ali Smith. 4. Jackie Kay, Ian Rankin, Alan Massie, James Robertson, William (Bill) Watson. Extracts from Reviews for Volume 3 Murray is a fine interviewer as well as an incisive critic, academic and biographer. These aren't the kind of interviews that merely gift-wrap the books under discussion; here she's putting whole careers up for lively discussion, and unless she has read every word she wouldn't dream of pressing the tape recorder's "on" button. This is one book it would be impossible to read without wanting to re-read at least half a dozen more straight away. David Robinson, The Scotsman One woman has for several years been circumventing the tired old restrictions and distortions of the formula. Isobel Murray, Honorary Professor in Modern Scottish Literature at Aberdeen University, has been getting writers to talk, at length, on tape ...It is an utterly gripping collection. Because the writers are allowed to express themselves without being manipulated or paraphrased, their conversation evolves into real revelation. Murray's consummate skill as an interviewer. She never intrudes, or interrupts, or postures. Her deep knowledge and understanding of literature and writing act as a sort of psychological water diviner, drawing out descriptions and confidences that a less clever interrogator would never bring to the surface. The obvious luminaries of this series may be the writers, but the pole star is Murray. Most other interviewers are mere astral dust by comparison. Rosemary Goring, The Herald Simply indispensable. Hugh MacDonald, The Herald

Jessie Kesson is best known for her loosely autobiographical novel The White Bird Passes, first published in 1958. It tells the story of a sensitive child in an Elgin slum, and her later banishment to an Aberdeenshire orphanage. She also published Glitter of Mica, Where the Apple Ripens and Another Time, Another Place, which was made into an award-winning film by Michael Radford. She was a writer of radio plays for the BBC for many years, and Stewart Conn has described her as 'one of the finest of for-radio writers'. She died in 1994, aged 78. Since then, Isobel Murray has edited a selection of her poems, plays and stories, Somewhere Beyond, and written a biography, Jessie Kesson: Writing Her Life. It was published in 2000, and was awarded a prize from the National Library of Scotland, as Research Book of the Year. Kesson and her husband were farm workers in North East Scotland from 1939 to 1951, and this volume contains work from this period, illustrating her abiding love of nature and immersion in the changing seasons. 'I carry climates within me', she said, and 'woods are my territory'. Her writing career was established in 1946 when she was commissioned to contribute twelve monthly articles on 'A Country Dweller's Year' for The Scots Magazine: 'I'm a real writer now'.

Naomi Mitchison published her first novel, The Conquered, in 1923. In her more than seventy succeeding books she has produced an extraordinary out-put, especially in the novel and the short story. This selection of the shorter fiction is intended to illustrate her range and achievement over more than fifty years. Beyond This Limit was the result of a unique co-operative partnership with illustrator Wyndham Lewis, and story and pictures are here first reproduced from the limited edition of 1935. The other contents range from a story of the cave painters of Lascaux, through Mitchison's major fictional preoccupations, ancient Greece, Scotland, Africa, to a story of post-holocaust Scotland first published in 1982. Central to all of them is a very individual intelligence constantly examining the politics of power in human relationships, including sexual ones. Edited with an Introduction by Isobel Murray, Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

A leech, a pirate, a predator, an anti-Christ, a public benefactor and the fisherman's friend; such is Gillespie Strang in this remarkably powerful Scottish novel. Gillespie is the harsh prophet of the new breed of Scottish entrepreneur, prepared to use any means to achieve his insatiable ambition amongst the nineteenth-century fishing communities of the west coast. John MacDougall Hay (1881-1919) was born and raised in Tarbert, Loch Fyne, on which he based the setting for Gillespie. A Church of Scotland minister, his knowledge of such communities and his sombre vision of good and evil shape this, his finest novel.

Jim Baxter - the legendary 'Slim Jim' - was arguably Scotland's greatest-ever footballer, a left-footed genius who became a Rangers icon and helped Scotland humiliate world champions England at Wembley in 1967 - with some famous keepie-uppie along the way. And although much has been written about Slim Jim over the years, the real story behind his life is now revealed for the first time. When Jim Baxter joined Rangers in 1960 for a record fee of GBP17,500, he quickly proved his worth, helping the team to ten trophies over the next five years. It was the start of a glittering career and a hard-drinking, hard-living lifestyle in the big city, where he fully enjoyed the fruits of his success. But behind the glamour on and off the park, Jim Baxter hid a secret that would torment him for most of his life, a secret he only discovered the full truth about when he was fifty years old. What is beyond doubt is that Slim Jim Baxter will forever be revered for his unbelievable footballing talent. He will also be remembered for his ability to live life to the full and beyond. But had he uncovered the truth earlier about the family secret that left him shattered, the life of this footballing genius might have been very different both on and off the pitch.