Books and war crimes

A recent donation of several World War II related books contained ‘Gekämpft, gesiegt, geschlagen’ written by Lothar Rendulić. It describes German military operations in the Finnmark/Troms region, close to the Russian border. The book is inscribed by Rendulić: ‘Mr. Liddell-Hart with my best greeting. Rendulic, Seewalcher am Allersee, November 1952.’ (Sir Basil Liddell-Hart was a […]

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Detail from a photograph showing the front of an Edinburgh tenament with a sign reading "The Wee Beer Shop"

New tools for the Digital Gallery

Today we are excited to launch a new interface which provides you with a suite of tools to better research, use, share and enjoy more than 730,000 images from our Digital Gallery. You can now easily zoom in and out and pan across images, examining them at an extraordinary level of detail, flip through the […]

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Are exams getting easier?

As many young people across Scotland await their exam results the National Library of Scotland is giving you an opportunity to look at the Scottish schools exam papers of bygone years. The digitised exam papers for the School Leavers Certificate from 1889-1961 and the Scottish Certificate of Education 1962-63 and these are now available to […]

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1967 Sexual Offences Act: 50 years ago today

It is 50 years today (27th July) since the passing of the 1967 Sexual Relations Act, which de-criminalised male homosexuality (female homosexuality had never been criminalised).  The findings of the Wolfenden Report[1] were the biggest impetus for the change in the law. Amongst the Library’s huge collections we have many publications dating from the period […]

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Tam Dalyell: the shipping news

When Tam Dalyell, the distinguished politician, died in January, I fell to reminiscing about his long public service. As is often the case, appreciation of a person’s qualities is heightened by their sudden departure; too late for delivering a message personally, we are inspired to write about them instead. I could focus on his detestation […]

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Monster making in 1816

“We shall each write a ghost story” was Lord Byron’s challenge to his guests at Villa Diodati near Geneva in the summer of 1816. This competition would eventually produce two of the greatest gothic novels; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). 

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