Under Crofton's collector's eye, the rollicking spirit of Scotland, old and modern, comes proudly alive' — Sunday Herald Scottish History without the Boring Bits offers a colourful melange of the bawdy, the bloody, the horrific and the hilarious episodes and characters that have spattered the pages of our nation's story. From the War of the One-Eyed Woman to the MP cleared of stealing his ex-mistress's knickers, Ian Crofton presents a host of little-known tales that you won't find in more conventional works of history. The story starts in the 4th millennium BC with the expulsion from Eden of the first Scot. It then makes its way via the medieval bishop roasted in butter and the appearance of the Devil in Ayrshire disguised as a lady's lapdog, right up to the twenty-first century, when US intelligence identified a distillery on Islay as a possible threat to world peace. So forget the usual parade of what James Bridie called 'Wallace-the-Bruceism' and 'Charlie-over-the-waterism'. That's all history. Here, for the first time, is the story of Scotland as it's never been told before. Praise for Ian Crofton's A Dictionary of Scottish Phrase and Fable: 'The kind of book you find yourself immersed in long after you should have put it down' Times Literary Supplement
