The word Darien is a scar on the memory of the Scots, and the hurt is still felt even where the cause of the wound is dimly understood. Three hundred years ago the Parliament of Scotland, in one of its last acts before the nation lost its political identity, defied the King and the persistent hostility of the English to establish a noble trading company, to settle a colony, and to recover its people from a century of despair, privation, famine and decay. The site of the colony, Darien on the Isthmus of Panama, was the enduring dream of William Paterson, the erratically brilliant Scot who had helped to found the Bank of England. He called it 'the door of the seas, and the key of the universe', and believed that it would become a bridge between East and West, an entrepot through which would pass the richest trade in the world. The first attempt to make the Company a joint Scots and English venture was crushed by the English Parliament. The Scots created it by themselves, in a wave of almost hysterical enthusiasm, subscribing half of the nation's capital. Three years later the 'noble undertaking', crippled by the quarrelsome stupidity of its leaders, deliberately obstructed by the English Government, and opposed in arms by Spain, had ended in stunning disaster. Nine fine ships owned by the Company had been sunk, burnt or abandoned. Over two thousand men, women and children who went to the fever-ridden colony never returned. It was a tragic curtain to the last act of Scotland's independence. John Prebble's book is the first detailed account of the Darien Settlement, drawn from original sources in the records of the Company, the journals, letters and memoirs of those who tried to turn William Paterson's dream into reality.

'You are hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, and to put all to the sword under seventy.' This was the treacherous and cold-blooded order ruthlessly carried out on 13 February 1692, when the Campbells slaughtered their hosts the MacDonalds at the Massacre of Glencoe. It was a bloody incident which had deep repercussions and was the beginning of the destruction of the Highlanders. John Prebble's masterly description of the terrible events at Glencoe was praised as 'Evocative and powerful' in the Sunday Telegraph.

Betrayal!

In the terrible aftermath of Culloden, the Highlanders suffered at the hands of their own clan chiefs...

Following his magnificent reconstruction of the moorland battle in Culloden, John Prebble recounts how the Highlanders were deserted and then betrayed into famine and poverty. While their chiefs grew rich on meat and wool, the people died of cholera and starvation or, evicted from the glens to make way for sheep, were forced to emigrate to foreign lands.

Culloden is the story of a battle and of what followed, the destruction of a way of life and the persecution of a people. There is little in this book about Bonnie Prince Charlie and other principals of the last Jacobite Rising of 1745. This is the story of ordinary men and women involved in the Rebellion, who were described on the gaol registers and regimental rosters of the time as 'Common Men'.

Culloden recalls them by name and action, presenting the battle as it was for them, describing their life as fugitives in the glens or as prisoners in the gaols and hulks, their transportation to the Virginias or their deaths on the gallows at Kennington Common. The book begins in the rain at five o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, 16 April 1746, when the Royal Army marched out of Nairn to fight the clans on Culloden Moor. It is not a partisan book, its feeling is for the 'Common Men' on both sides - John Grant charging with Clan Chatten and seeing the white gaiters of the British infantry suddenly as the east wind lifted the cannon smoke, and Private Andrew Taylor in a red coat waiting for Clan Chatten to reach him, likening them to 'a troop of hungry wolves'.

Culloden reminds us, too, that many of the men who harried the glens as ruthlessly as the Nazis in Occupied Europe were in fact Scots themselves. It recalls the fact that many men in Prince Charles' army had been forced to join him. It shows that a British foot-soldier's wish for a sup of brandy on a cold morning before battle is as much a reality as a Prince's pretensions to a throne. The detail for the story told in Culloden has come from regimental Order Books and manuals, from contemporary newspapers and magazines, from the letters and memoirs of soldiers and officers, eye-witness accounts of atrocity and persecution, and the personal stories of the victims themselves.

Culloden is the story not of a Prince, but of a people.

Michael Caine stars in this epic story of the battle of Rorke's Drift, on January 22nd 1879, where 1,200 British troops found themselves completely outnumbered by irate Zulu warriors in Natal, South Africa. Having already destroyed a very large British garrison, 4,000 Zulu warriors are now on their way to overcome the handful of men stationed at Rorke's Drift. The two lieutenants in charge of the garrison, Jon Chard (Stanley Baker) and Gonville Bromhead (Caine), are at odds with each other, but manage to rally the men together and put up a courageous fight. Only a few of the men survived, eleven receiving the Victoria Cross.

'A tale of irresponsibility and inexperience' THE TIMES 'Graphically written with a sense of dramatic construction' SCOTSMAN On December 28th 1879, the night of the Great Storm, the Tay Bridge collapsed, along with the train that was crossing, and everyone on board... This is the true story of that disastrous night, told from multiple viewpoints: The station master waiting for the train to arrive - who sees the approaching lights simply vanish. The bored young boys watching from their bedroom window who witness the disaster. The dreamer who designed the bridge which eventually destroyed him. The old highlanders who professed the bridge doomed from the outset. The young woman on the ill-fated train, carrying a love letter from the man she hoped to marry... THE HIGH GIRDERS is a vivid, dramatic reconstruction of the ill-omened man-made catastrophe of the Tay Bridge disaster - and its grim aftermath.

Michael Caine stars in this epic story of the battle of Rorke's Drift, on January 22nd 1879, where 1,200 British troops found themselves completely outnumbered by irate Zulu warriors in Natal, South Africa. Having already destroyed a very large British garrison, 4,000 Zulu warriors are now on their way to overcome the handful of men stationed at Rorke's Drift. The two lieutenants in charge of the garrison, Jon Chard (Stanley Baker) and Gonville Bromhead (Caine), are at odds with each other, but manage to rally the men together and put up a courageous fight. Only a few of the men survived, eleven receiving the Victoria Cross.