The Riotous Passions of Robbie Burns by John Ivison

Poet, romantic, lover and carouser, Robert Burns blazed into Edinburgh in 1786 like a comet. The seat of the Scottish Enlightenment was electrified by the arrival of the ploughman poet and his free-thinking accounts of 18th-century peasant life. But while Burns’ tinder heart was often set alight, he found his love poems failed to have the desired effect on the “lively half of mankind,” as the capital’s refined ladies kept this force of nature at arm’s length.

Join Burns on his adventures in this historical novella told through the eyes of his young companion, John Bruce. In a town where you could hit “50 geniuses, 50 bankers, 50 lawyers and 50 rogues” with a pistol at any given hour, meet the infamous Deacon Brodie and the Crochallan Fencibles drinking club and learn the cause of the rift between the poet and his young protégé – Clarinda, the inspiration for one of his finest love tales, Ae Fond Kiss.