Analysis: Britannica rules the shelves when it comes to offering schools an opportunity for enlightenment

Published on Monday 24 January 2011 13:50

Any book, of course, is a meaningful gift and, in helping to stock the library in The Good Samaritan school in Cite Soleil, the charity and those who contribute to it are giving a lifeline, a chance for change and a gift that continues to give.

But how closely did the MSPs think about the particular titles before announcing their choice? Alex Salmond doesn't specify which biography of Burns, but if it's the wonderful The Bard by Robert Crawford, there will be a great deal of uncomfortable information on the fact Burns very nearly became an overseer on a sugar plantation in the Caribbean.

Likewise, the sentiments in the Collected Poems are universal in appeal: but we should bear in mind that when Toussaint Louverture founded Haiti and threw out the overseers, fired by the same belief that "a man's a man for a' that", it ended in monstrous reprisals from Napoleon.

Annabel Goldie plays it safe and smart with Westwood and Kinghill's The Lore of Scotland. Such folk-tales strike a chord regardless of country or creed; and no doubt The City of Glasgow, chosen by Anne McLaughlin, will seem greyly exotic. Similarly, the Katie Morag island tales, sent by culture minister Fiona Hyslop, is a classic with a timeless heroine and has the perpetual innocence of childhood.

Both Iain Gray and Bill Aitken chose Lewis Grassic Gibbon's A Scots Quair, and many of its themes - the transition from rural to urban life, the exploitation of the agricultural poor - will not be dissimilar, even if the language might add an extra layer of difficulty to learners of English.

Did Tavish Scott re-read Treasure Island? Perhaps the post-colonial undertones escaped him. Fantasia though it is, the stereotypes might be slightly embarrassing (as in Chapter 35 with its "shore boats full of Negroes and Mexican Indians and half-bloods").

Robert Brown's choice of Catriona and Kidnapped is less problematic, and nowhere was Stevenson's supremely elegant prose bettered. What else should be sent?

This is the 300th anniversary of the birth of David Hume, the first modern philosopher, and a set that included the other writers of the Enlightenment - Adam Smith, Frances Hutcheson and Smellie's Encyclopaedia Britannica - would be forward-looking.

• Stuart Kelly is Books Editor of Scotland on Sunday