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...writings chronicle life in the First Century AD, describes soap as ‘an invention of the Gauls for giving a reddish tint to the hair’. He even gives recipes for making soap, indicating that it was used ‘to disperse scrofulous sores’. It’s difficult to imagine the smell and discomfort associated with its early use. [Making soap] Exactly when soap arrived on...

...write, and pray. Their food was only bread and vegetables, with a little salt, and they never drank anything better than a little milk mingled with water. After their repast they spent three hours in prayer and adoration; then took a little rest, rose at cock-crowing, and continued in prayer till they went out to work. Their habit was of the skins of beasts. When any one...

...writing is part of it, in particular his preservation in verse and song of rural and small-town Scotland that was fast disappearing in the march to modernisation. His use of humour, based on his close observation of the foibles of the people around him, combined with his vivid imagination and the remarkable potency of his language that generated popular poems such as the...