" This strikingly original book is about place and history - about the universe of the Black Sea, from Jason and the Golden Fleece to the fall of Communism and the new world disorder.

Is it a true nation? In Stone Voices, Neal Ascherson launches what he calls an imaginative invasion of his native land, searching for the relationships, themes, and fantasies that make up "Scotland.

Leopold 2d and his use of economic power to extend his royal authority.

Stone Voices is Ascherson's return to his native Scotland. It is an exploration of Scottish identity, but this is no journalistic rumination on the future of that small nation.

Although a colourful and vivid eye-witness account of the 1980 upheavals, it is to these questions that Neal Ascherson's brilliant and thoughtful analysis mainly addresses itself.

This is the inspiring and charming true story of one of the Second World War's most unusual combatants - a 500-pound cigarettesmoking, beer-drinking brown bear.

In the book's final section, a vivid and memorable collection of sectarians, spies, traitors, heroes, monsters and victims reveals a lot about fear and hope in the closing years of this dangerous century.