Back, after a long absence!.... .... with a book recommendation. Recently published, a reviewer comments: "The Scottish author James Robertson was much praised for his first novel, The Fanatic. His second, Joseph Knight, is a book of such quality as to persuade you that historical novels are the true business of the writer, that it's through the past that we might understand ourselves best, that it's in the past that the imagination can be most free, but also most authentic. Based on fact, and built out of hefty chunks of alternately tender and shocking fiction, the novel revolves around an 18th-century incident in which a black slave brought to Scotland from Jamaica fled his master and was subsequently set free by the courts on the grounds that the slave laws of Jamaica had no place in Scotland. The slave, Joseph Knight, had been the property of Sir John Wedderburn, a former Jacobite, who as a teenager had fled the butchery of Culloden and sailed to the West Indies with his brothers to rebuild the family fortune......". And from another... "Exiled to Jamaica after Culloden, Sir John Wedderburn makes a fortune as a sugar planter. On returning to Scotland, he brings with him Joseph Knight, one of the first slaves in Scotland. Changes in the intellectual, social and political climate in Scotland lead master and slave to engage in a court battle: one man trying to retain his property, the other to gain his freedom. Ranging from the back streets of Dundee to a mining community in Fife and the heart of Enlightenment Edinburgh, this beautifully constructed and paced novel illuminates an almost forgotten episode in Scottish history......" Sir John Wedderburn, first son of the executed Sir John, (lifeguard of Bonny Prince Charlie at Culloden), was considered one of the more 'lenient' members of the Jamaican plantocracy. His younger brother Dr. James was not so well disposed to his slaves, as his illegitimate son Robert Wedderburn describes in his autobiographical account "The Horrors of Slavery". Two excellent reads... "James Knight" £10.99, by James Robertson is published by Fourth Estate (Harper Collins) ISBN: 0-00-715024-5 http://www.fireandwater.com/Books/default.asp?id=25996 "The Horrors of Slavery" by Robert Wedderburn, Markus Wiener Publishers. ISBN 1-55876-050-4 and ISBN 1-55876-051-2. (£10 from Amazon) Iain McCalman, Australian National University, the author of Radical Underworld Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840, edited and introduces the texts. (Robert Wedderburn) "This colourful, disreputable character is important to the African-American tradition. He became a leading proponent not only of abolition, but of what would be termed today a black theology of liberation, and a major figure in England's republican underground of the Georgian and Regency periods. He was at once a witness and victim of West Indian slavery. His autobiography is a vivid indictment of an execrable system; its accounts burn themselves into the reader's mind like the sting of the slaver's whip." -Publishers Weekly Peter The Wedderburn Pages : www.wedderburn.ws - including the G.H.O.S.T. glossary : Genealogy: Help with Old Scottish Terms