Posted by tqadmin on 4 Mar, 2023
At the end of last year, we moved out of Cumbria after twenty happy years; though we are not far over the border, and I still get my Sunday newspaper in the county. The move came with all the usual complications and stresses – but it was of our own choosing. There are British people outside the UK who have had to move without the luxury of a choice. Brexit has produced some surprising results. In data published by the EU statistical office, Eurostat, 2,250 UK citizens were ordered to leave EU countries between 2020 and September 2022. What came as a huge surprise was that nearly half that number came from Sweden. While...
read morePosted by tqadmin on 13 Sep, 2022
That was the reaction of one member of the audience at the production of Bothwell, Prisoner of Malmö. She’d just witnessed my son Fraser James MacLeod’s performance in the play that debuted in Ystad and Malmö in August. She was reacting to the tale of James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, who was Mary, Queen of Scots’ third husband. He was incarcerated for five years in Malmöhus, the city’s castle. (In 1569, when the play is set, Malmö was under Danish rule, only becoming part of Sweden after the 1658 Treaty of Roskilde.) Bothwell’s is a complicated story that began in his native Scotland, where he rose to be an important lord and supporter of...
read morePosted by tqadmin on 23 Dec, 2021
It’s been another strange year, hasn’t it? But it hasn’t been without interest. One highlight in Sweden has been the long-overdue appointment of a woman prime minister. Magdalena Andersson initially lasted one day (the budget was defeated in parliament). But now she’s back. Hopefully, this time she’ll last a while longer. The way Covid has been handled in the UK and Sweden continues to differ. We witnessed at first hand what it was like in Sweden in the autumn, when we made our first trip over there in two years. Despite certain difficulties, it was a great feeling crossing the Öresund Bridge and reaching Swedish soil. It really did feel like going home. And...
read morePosted by Torquil MacLeod on 17 Jun, 2021
In the quiet village of Dunscore in rolling countryside ten miles north of Dumfries in southern Scotland, you’ll find a modern memorial stone close to the parish church. It was put there by the community showing their pride in a local woman who had died seventy-seven years ago. She was brought up on a farm near the village and attended the local school before moving on to Dumfries Academy, where she excelled academically. It was the launch pad for an extraordinary and courageous life that was to end in the death camp at Auschwitz. I came across Jane Haining when I was doing research for my latest book, Mammon in Malmö, which appears...
read morePosted by Torquil MacLeod on 30 Dec, 2020
As I write this, we are on the cusp of a new year. We leave behind 2020 with little regret. Yet with the news that another, easier-to-distribute vaccine will be available soon, maybe the world will return to some sort of normality in 2021. It has been an unsettling and often upsetting time for us all. Bunkered down for most of the year has enabled me to complete a couple of drafts of Mammon in Malmö which should see the light of day in April. Sadly, we have been unable to visit our family in Sweden. The Swedish approach to Covid has been controversial with no lockdowns during the first wave. At one stage...
read morePosted by Torquil MacLeod on 13 Oct, 2020
Readers of my last book, Mourning in Malmö, will be well aware of my protagonist’s efforts to discover why the MS Estonia sank in the Baltic on a stormy night in September 1994 on its run from Tallinn to Stockholm. Her fictional father was one of the 852 ferry passengers and crew that were lost that night; 501 of them were Swedes. An official enquiry was set up after the tragic event and it was this Joint Accident Investigation Committee’s findings that have sparked off over two decades of conspiracy theories. In the book, Anita Sundström explores a number of these theories in her search for the truth. The committee (JAIC) – made up...
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