They were all deeply interested in the welfare of their countrymen. They might not see their way to adopt all the measures that were proposed, but he protested against the accusation that they the ministers of the F.C. were indifferent.

The Crofters’ Act

The bill which finally reached the statute book as the Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act in June 1886 was essentially based on the Irish Land Act of 1881. The only significant piece of legislation passed by Gladstone's short-lived third administration, the bill was introduced to the House of Commons in early 1886 by G. O. Trevelyan, Gladstone's Scottish Secretary, and was modelled on an earlier bill which had failed to gain Parliamentary assent the previous year. The legislation was predicated on the concept of ‘dual ownership’, which was at the heart of the Liberal land policy. Under this system the tenant owned the improvements and the security of the tenancy while the proprietor retained the actual ownership of the land. The new Act granted security of tenure and compensation for improvements, and gave an independent statutory Crofters’ Commission the power to set rents and cancel arrears. The Liberal leadership was swayed by the historical argument that the crofters had been unfairly deprived of their ancestral lands and they used this to justify legislating for only one particular region of the country. But in his criticisms of the bill in the Commons, the Tory spokesman, Arthur J. Balfour, attacked Trevelyan for holding the ‘erroneous and utterly unfounded theory that the crofter in the Highlands had some kind of prescriptive and hereditary right to fixity of tenure’.

Realist movements in Russian art and cultural theory began to emerge towards the middle of the nineteenth century, influenced by the French realist and naturalist traditions, and by a perceived need to create a new, national art form of popular appeal. In his What is Art (1897), for example, Leo Tolstoy asserted that ‘Great works of art are only great because they are accessible to everyone'. Similarly, in his The Aesthetic Relations of Art and Reality (1855) the writer Anatole Chernyshevsky claimed that ‘Art does not limit itself only to the beautiful … it embraces the whole of reality … The content of art is life in its social aspect'; whilst the theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky asserted that ‘we are striving to brighten the dark existence of the poor classes … Our aim is to create the first intelligent, moral, popular theatre, and to this end we are dedicating our lives'. This socially and politically oriented realist tradition was also reinforced by the emphasis on realism within the Marxist tradition. However, Russian realism in the arts pre-dated the emergence of Bolshevism, and was more closely related to movements such as populism, a political movement which lobbied for the liberation of the Russian peasant from serfdom, and with the various liberal, socialist or social-democratic movements which were active in Russia prior to the foundation of the Bolshevik Party.

Although, as already mentioned, the development of a realist tradition in Russia towards the end of the nineteenth century was influenced by the aspiration to establish a more socially oriented art practice, it was also indirectly assisted by the systems of censorship and repression exercised by the Tzarist regime.

Sometime Rector of the University of Dundee, the actor, comedian and television presenter Stephen Fry has described Dundee's waterfront as ‘ludicrously ideal’. Scotland's fourth city has a truly dramatic location on the north bank of what has for many years been widely regarded as the cleanest major estuary in Europe. The cleanliness of the Tay Estuary is in no small measure due to the large freshwater discharge from the influent River Tay. Along with its many tributaries, it drains a catchment area of around 6,500 square kilometres. This extends into the rain and snowmelt-fed Grampian Highlands as far westwards as The Hill of the Calf, Beinn Laoigh, in Argyllshire and the flows generated downstream below Perth give the estuary a high natural flushing capacity on the ebbing or outflowing tide. For centuries this, along with the large tidal exchange, has helped to keep the estuary relatively free of pollutants, transporting and dispersing these seawards into the North Sea. While it may be small in wider European terms, the River Tay is, in fact, the foremost British river in terms of freshwater discharge; together with the subordinate River Earn it delivers a long-term mean inflow of around 180 cubic metres of fresh water per second (cumecs) into the estuary. In flood events, such as the notorious one in January 1993, the largest flood since 1814, which devastated large residential areas of Perth including the North Muirton housing estate, discharges of over twelve times the average value have been recorded. A peak discharge of 2,269 cumecs was recorded on the 17th of the month and the corresponding daily mean flow of 1,965 cumecs represents a UK record.

INTRODUCTION

From the age of fifteen, photographs framed Virginia Woolf's world. She wrote about photography in her diaries, letters and essays, and used photographic terms descriptively in her fiction. Before her marriage, and then together with Leonard, she took, developed and preserved photographs in albums. Photography was a continuous part of the Woolfs’ lives even if their photographic albums do not tell a coherent life story.

The Frederick Koch collection in Harvard Theatre Library houses seven albums, called the Monk's House albums, together with four boxes containing over two hundred additional loose photographs. None is catalogued. Although Woolf states in her letters that ‘I keep a family album’ in the singular, and many entries in the albums are in her hand, it is impossible to establish, either from their several diaries and autobiographies, or from internal evidence in the albums, who ‘authored’ each album (Woolf 1980a, p. 169). Just as Leonard and Virginia often shared the taking of photographs, for example, for Orlando, so it seems that the albums are a joint endeavour (figure 5).

SCOTTISH GAELIC LITERATURE throughout its history has been dominated by verse to an unusual extent. Prose has indeed enjoyed great popularity in an oral context, in heroic and romantic tales, in historical and other anecdotage, although verse was widely cultivated and enjoyed in the oral context also. But the written and printed literature of the Scottish Gaels over the last four centuries has included a high proportion of verse, and although the balance in recent times has begun to change significantly in favour of prose, as far as printed work goes, verse continues to hold a central and dominant place. It is still probably the most important touchstone of literary taste, and it still stands at the frontiers of innovation.

That this is so can hardly be explained solely in terms of the ancient prestige that poetry enjoyed, in Gaelic as in Irish and Welsh society, for such a prestige is not uncommon in early times. Yet part of the explanation may lie in that, and it is certainly true that the practice of poetry rested on a highly organized and prestigious basis. The system of organized learning and recording into which the poets fitted in early times is best known in an Irish context, but it is clear that many parts of that system functioned in Gaelic Scotland.