Цитаты из книг — Артур Херман

The language [of early Scottish immigrants to America] was also shamelessly intimate and earthy: passersby were addressed as “honey” and children as “little shits.” They dubbed local landmarks Gallows Branch or Cutthroat Gap or Shitbritches Creek (in North Carolina). In Lunenberg County, Virginia, they even named two…

When mortal illness finally overtook Kames, at age eighty-six, he greeted it stoically with his usual lack of sentimentality. His last day on the bench, he said merely good-bye to his colleagues with a jocular “Fare ye weel, ye bitches!”

Another time he pronounced the death sentence on an old acquaintance, who had been an opponent at chess. “And that’s checkmate, Thomas!” Kames quipped as they led the man away.

Any sensible person would have realized that the Darien venture was doomed from the start. As a modern historian, Patrick Riley, explains, “No one can really defend an attempt to establish a colony in a fever-ridden territory belonging to someone else.” Although Paterson and the other directors knew the enterprise would…

It was news of the theft of the Lia Fail, however, that moved the Scottish nationalist movement from the shadows to center stage. It ignited a major sensation in Scotland as the public cheered the thieves on. After an exhaustive and slightly hysterical four-month hunt, the authorities finally found the stone at Arbroath…

That led two enterprising Irish scoundrels, William Burke and William Hare, to offer a steady supply of dead bodies to anatomy professor Robert Knox with no questions asked- steady because they began murdering the victims themselves. When their hideous enterprise was revealed in 1829, the trial of Burke and Hare caused a…

The Scots Magazine in those years noted that Scotland is “the most drunken nation on the face of the earth” - worse even, it confessed shamefacedly, than the Irish. The dinner parties of the smart and respectable flowed with alcohol. Courtesy demanded that after dinner the host offer a toast to each guest in turn, with a…

The Presbyterian Ulster Scots also brought over their burning hatred of Episcopalians. When one Anglican missionary tried to preach in the Carolina mountains, the locals “disrupted his services, rioted while he preached, started a pack of dogs fighting outside the church, loosed his horse, stole his church key, refused…

Andrew Fletcher cared passionately about freedom, but it was a peculiar kind of freedom. In 1697 he had called for a compulsory universal militia, creating four camps, one in Scotland and three in England, where every young man, on beginning his twenty-second birthday, would receive military training of the most rigorous…