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Mary Elizabeth Haldane was Naomi Mitchison's paternal grandmother ('Granniema'). Like her granddaughter, she lived to be a centenarian, raised a large family, exhibited varied talents and died beloved by a wide range of family, friends and admirers. Her children included her son Richard, who was Secretary of State for War, and then Lord Chancellor, Mitchison's father, a great scientist whose work saved many lives, and the author/editor of this slim volume, originally compiled really for family and friends, Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane, an outstanding woman who became Scotland's first woman Justice of the Peace. 'Granniema' had five step children and six of her own. Despite a sometimes painful religious upbringing, she was to achieve something near sainthood: a devout believer herself, she had a large-hearted tolerance, and encouraged liberty of thought. No one accuses her of narrowness. Born some half a century too early to achieve fame in the wider world, she nevertheless won the hearts of everyone she knew. She loved painting but was not trained. She was widowed, after a very happy marriage, for forty-eight years, for the last twelve of which she was an invalid. She was first mistress of Cloan, and a great nineteenth-century heroine. ... Read more

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Recounts the adventures of Sun and Moon, the twin children of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. ... Read more

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Small Talk... avoids the temptation of a full-blown 'My Life and Times' type of autobiography and presents instead a recreation ofchildhood years in Oxford before the First World War - a child's-eye view of the family, the friends, the servants, the pets and the holidays in Scotland and Cornwall that made up that childhood. It is as much concerned with her own development as an amateur field botanist as with the occasions when the adult world intruded, when 'Uncle Richard' (Lord Haldane) might lead the younger members of the family out to the wash-house to watch the messy business of heating wax to take the impression of the Great Seal of England. If Lord Baden-Powell and Andrew Lang appear briefly, it is less as famous figures of the period, but rather as irritating visitors with passions either for tying knots or talking about fairies who interrupted the pleasures of raiding the kitchen garden for fruit, or reading at night behind the curtains of the drawing-room. There are glimpses of her reactions to scientific theories, as they reached her in repercussions from her father's work, and to the High Tory politics of her formidable mother.Small Talk... is a precise, vivid picture of the people and manners of a world which has receded so rapidly that it is now further from the experience of people today as the other side of the moon. In another sense, though, it is a timeless picture of childhood itself.The introductory essay by Ali Smith "The Woman From The Big House" was first first published in Chapman 50. ... Read more

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During a long drought in Botswana when money for school is scarce, a thirteen-year-old girl discovers that her skill at making pottery is the key to her continued education. ... Read more

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Rich and frank in passions, and rich, too, in the detail which helps to make feigned life seem real.' Times Literary Supplement ... Read more