Because in-person events weren’t possible during this project, we recorded a series of podcasts to introduce the world of these magazines. You can listen via Apple Podcasts or the SoundCloud player below.

• Murdo Macdonald, on Edinburgh Review (1984-2014) and Common Sense (1987-1999)

This was a highly stimulating conversation on the student publishing scene at the University of Edinburgh in the 1980s, in which the relaunched Edinburgh Review and Common Sense both emerged, alongside the tremendous achievements of Polygon Press as a literary and academic publisher.

Professor Murdo Macdonald is our guide to the rich intellectual and social connections of this world, with the Edinburgh University Students Publication Board at its centre. Some key figures include Peter Kravitz, Jenny Turner, Richard Gunn and Duncan Mclean, and through them we encounter a very wide range of writers, thinkers, designers and artists — too many to name here, though you can gain a sense of this scene via Kravitz’s introduction to the Picador Book of Contemporary Scottish Literature  (1998), courtesy of Janice Galloway’s website.

Interviewers: Alex Thomson and Scott Hames. The introduction to our conversation cites Linda Gunn and Alistair McCleery’s article ‘Wasps in A Jam Jar: Scottish literary magazines and political culture 1979–1999’, which you can access via the network’s informal bibliography.

• John Herdman, on the Scottish literary and political scene of the 1960s and 70s

A lively exploration of the cultural and political changes we can trace through small Scottish magazines of the 1960s and 70s, from Lines Review to Akros, Chapman and beyond.

The first issue of Scottish International went to press only a few weeks after the SNP’s breakthrough in the Hamilton by-election of 2 November 1967. But there was no easy correspondence between literary and political movements of the time, as the second wave of MacDiarmid’s Scottish Renaissance bristled against the ‘internationalism’ of 60s counterculture, and a young editor, Bob Tait, asked ‘What Kind of Scotland?’ the intelligentsia really wanted. John Herdman is the ideal guide to this terrain. Our conversation builds on his memoir Another Country: An Era in Scottish Politics and Letters, and traces these developments into the 1980s and beyond.

Interviewers: Rory Scothorne and Scott Hames. The introduction draws on Rory’s PhD research and on Eleanor Bell’s article ‘Rejecting the Knitted Claymore: the challenge to cultural nationalism in Scottish literary magazines of the 1960s and 1970s’, which you can access via the network’s informal bibliography. Edinburgh University library has an excellent resource on Scottish International, and Richard Crockatt has an evocative essay on Bob Tait and his world, published by Sceptical Scot.

• Esther Breitenbach on Scottish feminist magazines

A recording of the network’s launch event, ‘Mind that Magazine?’, which began with the reflections of Peter Kravitz and Glenda Norquay on the world of Edinburgh Review and Cencrastus in the early 1980s.