autobiographers-from-scotland

"Mr. Lomax, who was born in Scotland, was 19 when he joined the in 1939. He was one of thousands of British soldiers who surrendered to the Japanese in . Many were relocated to Thailand and forced to build the , also known as the Death Railway. ... Mr. Lomax was repeatedly beaten and interrogated after his captors found a radio receiver he had made from spare parts. Multiple bones were broken and water was poured into his nose and mouth. One of his constant torturers stood out: , an interpreter. ... ... He learned that after the war Mr. Nagase had become an interpreter for the Allies and helped locate thousands of graves and mass burial sites along the Burma Railway."

"burnt in a furnace surrounded by water created ; steam confined in a cylinder pushed a , and linked to wheels by rods that turned the straight thrust of the piston into rotatory motion, the moved and worked. The idea that hordes of people and commodities could be carried at such shockingly powerful speeds by a sort of articulated kettle, in which the water could never be allowed to fall below the top of the furnace or there would be an explosion, seemed amazing to me. What made it all so different from today's s, which run at set speeds, was the need to be aware at every moment of the perilous balance of fire and water, which also gave the possibility of going a little faster if the engineman was good, or of disaster if he was incompetent."

"visited Thailand many times after that, and did charitable work for the surviving Asian labourers, many of whom were unable to return home to India or after the war and dragged out miserable lives in villages near the railway; and he opened a temple of peace on the , and spoke out against . It all seemed admirable, but I read about these things with a surprising sense of detachment. I had expected to feel some more powerful emotion, but apart from the eerie feeling of being present at my own torture as an onlooker I felt empty. And I wondered at his feeling that he had been forgiven. God may have forgiven him, but I had not; mere human forgiveness is another matter."

"Sometime the hating has to stop."

"Some things that humans make transcend their function; instruments can be magical. That explosive, rhythmic sound we call says more to us about getting under way, about departure, than a can ever do; perhaps it has something close to the beat of our pulse. Even if we were using up and heating the earth too much, and no-one knew that at the time, it would have been worth making an exception for steam engines. They were beautiful machines; the most beautiful machines produced in the ."

"Watch ', which goes on general release in the new year, and you'll leave the cinema feeling you know all about the complicated, scarred individual at its centre: , who was and eventually rescued from his torment through the love of his wife . But there are three names you won't hear during the film: those of Nan, Eric's first wife, and Linda and Charmaine, his daughters. The four of them were a family for 37 years yet they are completely missing from the film, which stars , and ."

"The have survived for 50 years without interference by man and maintain high density on rich maritime pastures heavily manured by s. They are a obtained from a cross between old Scottish shortwool and early blackface sheep. There is a population of about 400 on about 55 of pasture and the rams and ewes (with lamb and yearling rams) run in separate groups. The survival of rams is poor compared with ewes with an adult sex-ratio of about 10 ewes to 1 ram. Numbers of sheep fluctuate between 330 and 460 without causing sheet erosion, landslipping and disruption of the vegetation. The conservation plan for Boreray rests on continued non-interference with the sheep and no sheep should be introduced to the island."

"The 1870s saw the awakening of a desire among scientists to become more highly organized. The influence of Huxley and Darwin among others had spread north and the tangible outcome was the botanical papers by and (1882-84) and (1898-1909). Within this upsurge of interest came the and Buckley Fauna (1888) and work on the freshwaters by Scott (1891), followed by the Bathymetrical Survey of the Scottish Freshwater Lochs by and (1910). This was perhaps the first great work of the modern scientific era in the and is still the baseline for work on freshwaters, to which little has since been added."

"is a culture of the twentieth century possessing its own philosophical, ethical and scientific frame which is distinct from those of agriculture, and other producer . In the latter, conservation is directed towards the creation and maintenance of the quality and quantity of the product, be it cereal, wood pulp or automobiles; in the former, nature conservation is directed towards the maintenance of numbers of different species distributed in different assemblages of natural or semi-natural type and towards the care of geological and physiographical features."

"Can't you keep this bloody place tidy?""

"It was a long journey back to Walter's farm, which lay near the foot of Kilimanjaro in British East Africa. First there was the coastal steamer from Dar to Tanga, and then a day's journey from Tanga to Moshi on the Northern Railway, followed by a further day's wagon ride across the border to B.E.A. and his won farm near the small town and former mission station of Taveta."

"Dear Faye, I feel a little fitter today. Perhaps everything will be fine after all ..."

"There are so many hypochondriacs out here. I think Murray can spot them a mile off.""

"Actually I can't stand the man. Sanctimonious, Calvinistic, so-and-so. Totally unsympathetic -can't think why he became a doctor - hectoring, bullying-sort of moral storm-trooper.""

"(Chapter 2)"

"(Part One, Chapter Four)"

"I want you to get to know Murray because I want you to bribe him.""

"Philip looked at me. "I was going to ask you to dinner tonight, but now that I've seen your lunch I guess you won't be hungry.'"

"There were things about him that I found potently intriguing, but if I looked too closely at those vivid encrusted spots my scalp literally began to crawl and my eyes water.""

"I turned off Sunset Boulevard and drove up Micheltoreno to the site. The day was cloudy and an erratic and nervy wind rattled the leaves of the palmettos that the contractor had planted along the roadside. As I pulled into the curb at number 2265 I saw the old man""

"(Part One, Chapter One, p. 19)"

"That's Africa for you, eh? Trouble-free sex and tranquillizers. What do they call it? Post-pill paradise or something. Load of nonsense. Never seen a more neurotic, glum bunch in my life.""

"My maid Innocence. She's dead.'"

"He saw that she treated her marriage to his father as a relentless challenge, an unending struggle under adverse conditions to get her own way. At first this manifested itself only in the naming of her children, but lately, as she had come to know her enemy, or as he had grown more senile and eccentric, evidence of her own personality long-suppressed came increasingly to the fore."

"I have no idea why he did not like me. Normally, with an age gap of six years, an older brother will treat a younger with fond enthusiasm - a favorite sidekick, an instant fan, almost like a pet - but Thompson's attitudes then, as far as I remember, were either indifference or irritation.""

"(Chapter 1)"

"I know he never loved me, but that, as far as I am concerned, is of little importance. He did not love me because, quite simply, I was a constant reminder of his loss.""

"Germany has no blame for the Second World War."

"[re Princess Diana's death] I wondered at the time, what had happened to the moral fibre of the island race - the stiff upper lip, if you like - to make them behave like professional mourners howling for hire. The Prime Minister was proud. I was ashamed."

"He [Anthony Crosland] and his Socialist fellow-theoreticians did a terrific job in degrading scholastic standards in the name of equality, which meant dragging down the good to the level of the mediocre."

"But with today's mammoth papers the poor boobs have to write at ten times the length their subject is worth, and apart from over-padded news we have the curse of modern journalism, the proliferation of the commentary, the background exposition, the in-depth analysis, the "think-piece", all adding up to an indigestible stream of crap which no one wants to read, and no one, to judge by the mechanical repetition and weary rambling, wants to write either."

"War is men killing each other, often at close quarters, and doing their damnedest to stay alive. And until you have done that, against a capable enemy, you don't have any idea of what it's like, honestly. Mr Spielberg may splash the screen with gore, and publicists may declare: "You are there!", but you're not. You're snug in a cinema watching a load of crap performed by actors. Hand-to-hand fighting is different, and it's no place for a woman. (It's no place for anyone, including me, but for a woman least of all.)"

"They [women] cannot march as far or as fast as men, or endure the front-line ordeal as well, or drive a bayonet into an enemy with the same force, or tackle bare-handed an opponent far more muscular and brutal than they are. Some may be trained to shoot well, but whether they will do so in action with male callousness (and eagerness) is doubtful. Courage doesn't come into it. Women are if anything braver than men, but the notion of a female teenager fighting hand-to-hand with a Panzer Grenadier or a Japanese White Tiger - or a Royal Marine - is ludicrous."

"...and I haven't got to the bloody Japanese yet, with their poisoned stakes and booby traps and nasty habit of using prisoners for bayonet practice and no-surrender valour and fighting ability to match our own...almost."

"...after careful observation of our own children and their playmates at the toddler stage, that you will see in the nursery every crime in the book except sexual assault: GBH, attempted murder, theft, blackmail, extortion, lying, fraud, false pretence, menacing, putting in fear, robbery with violence, conspiracy, mayhem - the whole Newgate Calendar is on show, and if sex and high treason are exceptions it is only because the little blighters haven't got round to them yet."

"That political correctness should have become acceptable in Britain is a glaring symptom of the country's decline."

"Few things infuriate the ordinary citizen more than liberal attitudes to crime and criminals. And not only infuriate, but offend against justice, common sense, and fair play. The ordinary citizen is neither a brute nor a sadist; he is humane (as most liberals are not), he is compassionate when it is called for, leans over backwards to be fair, and is ready to give a second chance. But he knows the difference between right and wrong, and has an instinctive sense of the difference between right and mere legality. He believes that wrongdoing should be punished with appropriate degrees of severity; deep in his understanding lies a feeling that eye for eye and tooth for tooth is not without merit, and that the punishment should fit the crime."

"Whoever said that Russia was an enigma inside a something-or-other inside something else, was dead right. I don't understand the place yet."

"It is a habit of great countries of imperial pretensions to take the future for granted, as the Romans did in Trajan's day, and as Britons, with a few far-sighted exceptions, did at Victoria's jubilees, and Americans do now."

"First, I hope to see the British public resist the propaganda onslaught of the pro-Europeans, in which the broadcast media, led by the BBC, have shown themselves willing tools of the government, and vote a resounding "no" in the referendum, if and when it comes."

"Certainly we tend to be resistant to change, on the whole, but that is because we have learned the hard way that change for its own sake is not a good idea, and that if something works more or less satisfactorily, it is best not to alter it without long and careful thought."

"Gravity, muzzle velocity, density, intensity, one for his nob, and bullshit baffles brains! There - into the breach, old Whatsit, and if all else fails we'll fix a bayonet on the bloody thing and charge! Fire at Will, he's hiding in the cellar, the cowardly sod!"

"But not half as angry, I dare swear, as our forefathers would be if they could see the betrayal, by worthless politicians, of the country they worked so hard to build, and the surrender of the precious freedoms won by better men at Gravelines and Trafalgar and Waterloo and Flanders and Alamein and in the skies above Kent."

"I never said, and don't believe, that all Germans are Nazis. I'm just pretty sure that they're all Germans, and that is the point."

"One way or another, the question whether Britain remains a free nation or becomes the vassal of a totalitarian Europe will be settled soon, and those who oppose our further integration would do well to remember, and proclaim as widely and as loudly as possible, the unashamed dishonesty that has characterised the pro-European movement from the beginning. Not since Lenin and Hitler cast their obscene spells has there been a political campaign so blatantly deceitful. In 1972 we were assured it was merely a Common Market, and that no political union could be envisaged: it is now shamelessly admitted that this was untrue, that political union was the aim from the start."

"What matters above all is sovereignty, the right to make our own laws......the right to remain independent of the unworthy, undemocratic, unprincipled, authoritarian, bureaucratic rabble of Brussels."

"...armchair strategists can look at the last stages of a campaign and say there's nothing left but mopping-up, but if you're holding the mop it's different. The last Jap in the last bunker on the last day can be just as fatal to you personally as the biggest battle at the height of the campaign, and you don't look or think much beyond him - wherever he is."

"...the leaders of an independent Scotland will be only too happy to trade away that independence in return for admission to the fleshpots of Brussels for themselves and their families, goes without saying; they have the example of Westminster to copy."

"The stark truth, of course, is that they have not abolished the death penalty at all. They have merely transferred it from the guilty to the innocent - and incidentally ensured that many more violent deaths occur."

"A Gurkha subaltern whom I met later told me that commanding a platoon of them was like leading a group of perfectly-disciplined ten-year-olds, and I believed him."