STAND-OFF
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Literary louts and layabouts
Edinburgh "was a post-war city of eccentrics all right, and someone should have written a book about it."
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R.I.P. Robert Reid
He "went down to Cowal...for this was his dearest place... saying goodbye to all his fondest memories, the gathering of his own folk, where he had excelled, never to be diminished by the real outsiders".
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The Tartan Triad
They became the new despots of pibroch to whom all pipers had to toady. Not to do so invited even worse vituperation than Campbell and Grant ever nightmarishly conceived.
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The Birth of the 'Glenfiddich'
It is also how an intended festival of piping, which would have helped to conserve the traditional styles, was turned into a vehicle to drive MacNeill's obsession with power...
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The MacCrimmon Manifesto
The Broadcasting Council for Scotland claimed the BBC booklet Piobaireachd was "the first comprehensive survey of the Highland bagpipe."
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The MacCrimmon book
The book, "in its deadly way, exposed the concealed history of Scotland, when to this day the author of an 'inconvenient' book can have his human rights abrogated and his and his family's lives destroyed, simply by the act of writing it. Freedom of speech is thus annulled in Scotland."
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The snoopers
They came uninvited to our home, ate our food and drank our drink, then tried to incite me into defaming Seumas MacNeill...If they but knew it, a sour smell comes off these snoopers, and the house felt unclean for weeks after their sleekit presence.
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How the book discredited the legend
More lies have been told about the MacCrimmon book and me than any other Scottish author or his work in the 20th century, best summed up by one of my legal advisers who flung his arms in the air in outrage and roared: "It must be hell, Alistair, being called a liar by liars."
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Smear Campaigns
"It was if the gates of a criminal lunatic asylum had swung open and out poured an interminable stream of homicidal maniacs, almost all apparently determined to destroy not merely me but my family. Truth was their first casualty."
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Search for the Gillies MS book
I could not afford a taxi from the station and had crippled my right leg during our flit in our aged car when we were first made homeless. After a painful journey on foot from the subway - you could have easily recognised me. I was the bloke who had to keep stopping to lean against the wall.
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Merchants of smear
Three smear campaigns were identified to protect child molesters from the consequences of their criminal behaviour. How the smear merchants will explain away their behaviour to their own wives and children will remain their eternal problem.
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