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10 Scotland Street – the story of an Edinburgh home and its cast of booksellers, silk merchants, sailors, preachers, politicians, cholera and coincidence and its widespread connections over two centuries across the globe.
10 Scotland Street – the story of an Edinburgh home and its cast of booksellers, silk merchants, sailors, preachers, politicians, cholera and coincidence and its widespread connections over two centuries across the globe.
If you love history+200 year old houses and are fascinated by Scotland, home of Robert L Stevenson & Robbie Burns & Muriel Spark (and kilt jokes, tho maybe not…) We lived in a house like this in 78/9. Magic Scotland!
This is a triumph. A love letter to the ghosts of Edinburgh. I feel its hand upon my shoulder.
The story that Leslie unfolds for us spreads its threads across the globe. And it moves through different strata of society, painting a kaleidoscopic portrait of social, political, fiscal and financial life in Scotland and beyond, all through the lens of a single flat in a single city [...] We learn how property and wealth were passed through families, not always in the straight lines we imagine inheritance to travel in. It’s not hard to read between the lines of wills and gifts to picture some of the loves and dislikes, the disapprovals and the determination to make good past wrongs. As a writer of fiction, I found myself itching to lift some of these characters from the page into the fertile fields of my own imagination.
A fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable book, a work of prodigious research […] Anyone who loves Edinburgh and is fascinated by its private histories will be entranced by this book.
Hills proceeds with thorough scholarship […] Above all, she writes really well: fluent, authoritative, persuasive prose, sometimes anecdotal, often slyly colliding formality and contemporary colloquialism.
The writing matches the process of researching in an archive when one’s eye is caught by something not directly concerned with the matter in hand, the so-called ‘rabbit holes’. There is a veritable warren of these […] I was genuinely sad to come to the final page of this book. I heartily recommend it.
A vivid portrait of individuals and social history of Georgian Edinburgh, incorporating global events and their inevitable consequences [...] This book is a labour of love and a tribute to the predecessors whose spirit [Leslie] feels keenly.
