A fascinating portrayal of many Scottish faces who have sadly departed our planet for pastures green, The Times Great Scottish Lives book exudes charm and attention to detail and is packed with attentive information that both compels and remains highly readable.

While many of the obituaries are informative and enjoyable, overall I found there were too many of people in whom I had little interest - football managers, etc. Women are unsurprisingly under-represented - while this is understandable in the earlier years, I'd have hoped for more balance in the more recent years. But what prevented me from really engaging with this collection was the clear political bias in so many of the political obituaries. Of course, I should have expected this since they come from The Times, but I'd have hoped for more objectivity over people's achievements once they were safely dead! On the whole, a very mixed bag for me.

This books brings to live through death the stories and histories of many of Scotland's citizens throughout the last 200 years, It is full of many recognisable and also some not so recognisable names from the breadth of Scottish society.

Thanks to Times Books and Netgalley for the advance reading copy.

I myself am Scottish so I thought it likely that I would find this collection of obituaries from The Times fascinating and the book largely lived up to my expectations. It was amusing to see the witty language used in some of the obituaries and also reading between the lines to see the thinly veiled denigrating commentary on some of the deceased. There is an eclectic group of people included, some very well known, others not so much. I was able to learn some interesting and illuminating facts about people I had heard of, but didn’t know much about e.g. Thomas Telford, a man who made a significant impact on the Highlands where I hail from. There were a number of people who piqued my curiosity enough that I immediately went to do further research on. These obituaries could be used as a starting point for a History teacher to use in a class project investigating past and current attitudes to these historical people.

There is however a noticeable lack of women, in the modern world this strikes me as a huge omission and jars a bit. I’d be curious to know if women were largely ignored when it came to getting a Times obituary write up in the first place, or whether the choice of obituaries included largely excluded women. There is also a tenuous link to Scottishness for some of the inclusions (although.. “What makes a Scot?” is a question that has been and will continue to be debated). In his introduction, Linklater mentions Lewis Grassic Gibbon for example and I felt his lack of inclusion to be a mistake when considering some of the other inclusions. Linklater himself states that part of the reason for inclusions were how interesting and well written the obituary itself was, but it still struck me as an omission.

Linklater also mentions the fact that obituary writers were anonymous so as to not have their political allegiances held against them. Despite that, it’s often easy to infer the bias against some of the individuals, highlighted particularly in the rather short and scornful obituary of Keir Hardie. Again, this is something Linklater explains this in the introduction - that many now considered titans of the past were not considered so at the time of the writing. That said, in some cases it appears rather incongruous, in the case of beloved writers in particular. This works in reverse too, with the glowing obituary of Douglas Haig for example, a man whose reputation has been thoroughly trashed in the years since World War I.

Overall, a very interesting collection of obituaries that shine a light on some of the current opinions of the day. I think this book would be a great gift for someone interested in learning more about some of the well-known, and less well-known people from Scottish History.

I’m confused. What makes someone Scottish? I have carefully read Magnus Linklater's introduction to this collection of obituaries of the great and the good. He justifies some of his choices and some of his omissions. He bemoans the lack of women in the collection, saying that it reflects the ‘age in which these obituaries were compiled’? Really? Margo MacDonald is included and she died in 2014. Amongst the men, Ronnie Corbett died in 2016. A funny man more worthy of inclusion than Lewis Grassic Gibbon, in Linklater's opinion but not mine. So what ‘age’ are we talking about here?

For me, for the purposes of a volume like this, a Scot is someone who is Scottish by birth. At risk of being accused or xenophobia or, worse still, racism, how many Scots by birth have gone to live in England and from then on identified themselves as English? Don’t all shout Tony Blair at once as that’s more an example of political expediency than fluid nationalism! What makes Salford born Sir Peter Maxwell Davies Scottish other than that he chose to live in Orkney for the last 30 years of his life? Dame Muriel Spark lived all her long adult life outside Scotland but was no less Scottish for it so why is ‘Max’ not English? Did he think of himself as Scottish? I wonder. This isn’t a puerile argument. It’s about meeting expectations and too many ‘Scots’ in this volume quite simply aren’t.

Stepping down off my soapbox, despite my intrinsic problem with the use of the epithet Scottish, this is an enjoyable collection of obituaries. I met people I’d never heard of before and enjoyed reading about those I had.