FRINK Linked Data Fragments server

Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W2064659401> ?p ?o ?g. }

• W2064659401 endingPage "376" @default.
• W2064659401 startingPage "374" @default.
• W2064659401 abstract "Reviewed by: Modern Scotland, 1914-2000 Christopher Harvie Modern Scotland, 1914-2000. By Richard Finlay. Pp. 424. ISBN 1 86197 299 7. London: Profile Books, 2004. £20.00. Richard Finlay's book has one immediate advantage. It lacks a quote from Irvine Welsh on the front cover. Endorsement by Scotland's worst writer has disfigured Arthur Herman's rather plodding How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2001) and disfigured in a much worse way James Buchan's excellent Capital of the Mind (2003): presumably a peril that any writer who has made it to a London publisher now stands in danger of. On the back cover, however, comes Tom Devine's 'The best single-volume history of twentieth-century Scotland I know'. Is your man, with a good conceit of himself, the right one to be doing the review? In fact, Devine is to a great extent right. While I can claim with some pride 'turning the accomplishment of many years into an hour-glass', of No Gods and Precious Few Heroes at precisely 55,000 words, Finlay has about 180,000 words to play with, and he makes good use of them. There is also a difference of approach: No Gods was broadly concerned to map out differences in employment, economy, social life and culture between Scotland and England, and the structures of its chapters tended to start with a statistical survey to establish Scots derivations from a British norm. It assumed that there was a central phase in twentieth-century Scotland, between 1920 and [End Page 374] 1964, where most of these factors were constants, followed by a more activist, less predictable phase which was still continuing when the first edition was published in 1981. By and large this worked, but, on re-reading, I find that it is sometimes rather deterrent in its factuality, and laconic about what it was like to experience such situations. Richard Finlay's approach is quite different: basically chronological, but with inserts in each chapter which cover institutions which underwent particular change in the period covered. Hence there is a concentration on education when covering the 1920s—the aftermath of the 1918 Education Act—on poor relief in the 1930s, and on the health service in the 1940s. Finlay has a sharp eye both for statistics and for telling statements from experts, policy-makers, reporters and victims. The longish quotes with which he peppers his narrative are very well chosen and will be a great boon to teachers and lecturers preparing seminar discussions. Finlay's book isn't perfect. Although oil is adequately treated, those other huge swan songs of the heavy industries, the Polaris and Trident projects, 1961 to the present, don't get in at all. Mind you, they don't get into my or Tom Devine's narratives either. It could do with three or four maps to locate the main changes of economy and society when expressed in spatial terms. There's also a need for a few key graphs, showing for instance the mounting production of energy, which has underwritten the expansion of the service sector, and the growth of physical mobility through motorisation. There are also more of what the Germans call Schönheitsfehler than there should be: 'Ian Hay' was the pseudonym of Ian Hay Beith not Ian Campbell Hay; the medieval Makar was William Dunbar, not Henry. But Richard Finlay can tackle these, I hope, in time for the paperback. One bugbear continues. Finlay, like Tom Devine, is impressionistic rather than scientific about industr y—not admittedly a happy stor y in twenti-eth-century Scotland. The problem is, I think, that economic history only reached us about 1930, neck and neck with the Slump. The post-Samuel Smiles generation who could have, for instance, mapped out the impact of capital export on domestic industrial investment just wasn't there. As a result, Finlay may lay too much stress on the left-wing argument of Tom Burns in The Real Rulers of Scotland (1938) that Scottish capitalism was distorted by a tightly-controlled oligarchy. The problem was in fact that most cross-directorships tended to be pretty low-powered accountancy posts, supervising companies..." @default.
• W2064659401 created "2016-06-24" @default.
• W2064659401 creator A5035455601 @default.
• W2064659401 date "2006-01-01" @default.
• W2064659401 modified "2023-09-25" @default.
• W2064659401 title "Modern Scotland, 1914-2000 (review)" @default.
• W2064659401 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/shr.2007.0011" @default.
• W2064659401 hasPublicationYear "2006" @default.
• W2064659401 type Work @default.
• W2064659401 sameAs 2064659401 @default.
• W2064659401 citedByCount "0" @default.
• W2064659401 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
• W2064659401 hasAuthorship W2064659401A5035455601 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConcept C124952713 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConcept C142362112 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConcept C166957645 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConcept C17744445 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConcept C199539241 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConcept C2779307921 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConcept C2779728303 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConcept C2780769345 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConcept C52119013 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConcept C74916050 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConcept C95457728 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConceptScore W2064659401C124952713 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConceptScore W2064659401C142362112 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConceptScore W2064659401C166957645 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConceptScore W2064659401C17744445 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConceptScore W2064659401C199539241 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConceptScore W2064659401C2779307921 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConceptScore W2064659401C2779728303 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConceptScore W2064659401C2780769345 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConceptScore W2064659401C52119013 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConceptScore W2064659401C74916050 @default.
• W2064659401 hasConceptScore W2064659401C95457728 @default.
• W2064659401 hasIssue "2" @default.
• W2064659401 hasLocation W20646594011 @default.
• W2064659401 hasOpenAccess W2064659401 @default.
• W2064659401 hasPrimaryLocation W20646594011 @default.
• W2064659401 hasRelatedWork W1586853258 @default.
• W2064659401 hasRelatedWork W1608322293 @default.
• W2064659401 hasRelatedWork W163268100 @default.
• W2064659401 hasRelatedWork W2067880197 @default.
• W2064659401 hasRelatedWork W2072799344 @default.
• W2064659401 hasRelatedWork W2259243698 @default.
• W2064659401 hasRelatedWork W227130028 @default.
• W2064659401 hasRelatedWork W2490199987 @default.
• W2064659401 hasRelatedWork W4224306471 @default.
• W2064659401 hasRelatedWork W648319993 @default.
• W2064659401 hasVolume "85" @default.
• W2064659401 isParatext "false" @default.
• W2064659401 isRetracted "false" @default.
• W2064659401 magId "2064659401" @default.
• W2064659401 workType "article" @default.