'The setting is a schoolroom near Manchester where an evening class of budding comics congregate for a final briefing from their tutor before facing an agent's man from London.

This volume explores the experience of everyday life in Scotland over two centuries characterised by political, religious and intellectual change and ferment. It shows how the extraordinary impinged on the ordinary and reveals people's anxieties, joys, comforts, passions, hopes and fears. It also aims to provide a measure of how the impact of change varied from place to place.The authors draw on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including the material survivals of daily life in town and country, and on the history of government, religion, ideas, painting, literature, and...

How to make better life-enhancing choices when environments crumble and population shifts disrupt our ways of living? Dr Griffiths takes a deep look at how our brains trick us into seeing the surface of things so that we lose sight of the deep relatedness on which our survival as groups will increasingly depend. Many astonishing insights follow. Body-mind dualism dissolves, as the ecological person moves with others in a renewed group-approach to thriving. Dilemmas in the standard quantum view of matter and spirituality resolve so that groups of people are empowered by the same fusion energy...