Library Gems

A brief introduction to three historical collections held in the Signet Library: the Mary Queen of Scots Collection, the John Napier Collection and the Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun Collection. Records for all of these have been added to the Library's online catalogue (https://sign.koha-ptfs.co.uk/)

"Blessed among my Kind":William Roughead, Poet

William Roughead is remembered as a pioneer of true crime, criminologist, and campaigner for justice but his first published book was on none of these things. 'Rhyme without Reason', a slim volume of verse. Roughead's poems have a variety of styles, settings, and voices. Unsurprisingly dark themes are not far away and murder and poison feature. Roughead's collection of crime books now resides in the Signet Library and his tribute to his library, 'To my Books' is printed in full

Oscar Slater:Presumed Guilty

A look at the trial and appeal of Oscar Slater with special reference to the role William Roughead, WS played as a recorder of events and as a key instigator in Slater's 1928 appeal. The Roughead Collection in the Signet Library contains Roughead's scrapbooks and correspondence

Book Review:John Finlay, The Community of the College of Justice: Edinburgh and the Court of Session, 1687-1808 (EUP, 2012)

No abstract available

Oscar Slater:What Happened...

No abstract available

Her Majesty's Signet

A survey of the WS Society's long relationship with the monarchy in honour of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee

Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est la Même Chose

The publication of Euan Sinclair and Ann Stewart, Conveyancing Practice in Scotland (6th edn, 2012) is a reminder of the enduring role of the WS Society's members in supporting best practice in property law for over 200 years. We look at how things began in the 18th century with the remarkable Robert Bell, WS (1760-1816). (Co-authored with Robert Pirrie.

What say will voters have in redrawing of the electoral map?

The government’s contentious legislation to reduce the number of MPs and introduce a new system for drawing parliamentary boundaries was passed in February 2011. It set out an ambitious timetable for final recommendations to be voted on by the House of Commons in October 2013, which required some fast work by the Boundary Commission for England (BCE) in particular, which has 502 new constituencies to design. Lewis Baston argues that the forthcoming Boundary Review won’t receive enough voter input to guarantee true legitimacy

How should ‘political England’ be recognised?

In the newly published IPPR pamphlet The Dog That Finally Barked: England as an Emerging Political Community, Richard Wyn Jones and Guy Lodge demonstrate, to anyone’s satisfaction, that there is such a thing as English identity and that it has a political component. Lewis Baston examines the arguments around the recognition of England as a political entity

2013 local elections: Votes cast in the sorts of places where general elections are decided are the most accurate indicator of party prospects in 2015

The commonly used yardsticks of how well the national parties are doing in local elections can be confusing or deliberately misleading, and there is likely to be a lot of ‘spin’ after the elections of Thursday 2 May. Lewis Baston argues that studying the votes cast in marginal parliamentary constituencies, particularly in areas where there have been other local elections since 2010, is a better guide to electoral trends than council control, seats won, or even – sometimes – aggregate votes cast