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It would be impossible to invent Don Roberto today – a fantastic combination of Don Quixote and Sir Gawain, Indiana Jones and the Lone Ranger. He was so multi-faceted, so complex, that every chapter in his story reveals some new and contradictory aspect of his personality. He is best known as the co-founder, with Keir Hardie, of the Scottish Labour Party, and later as the founding president of the Scottish National Party. But in a long and extraordinary life he was many other things besides.
It would be impossible to invent Don Roberto today – a fantastic combination of Don Quixote and Sir Gawain, Indiana Jones and the Lone Ranger. He was so multi-faceted, so complex, that every chapter in his story reveals some new and contradictory aspect of his personality. He is best known as the co-founder, with Keir Hardie, of the Scottish Labour Party, and later as the founding president of the Scottish National Party. But in a long and extraordinary life he was many other things besides.
A wonderful biography
A gripping tale of an adventurer, social reformer, politician and horseman living through turbulent times: Jamie Jauncey’s vivid and affectionate portrait of his great-great-uncle — whose interests so closely match his own — is a combination of all that is best in memoir, biography and history.
In this remarkable book, Jamie Jauncey has performed the great service of reminding us of a wonderful figure from Scotland’s recent history. The story is told with consummate skill: Don Roberto is there before us in all his glory.
Few political figures in Scottish history have led a more colourful life. A new biography, by his great-great-nephew, James Jauncey, drawing on hitherto unpublished family papers, casts fascinating new light on a man driven by almost implausible energy, purpose and passion.
I know [Robert Cunninghame Graham] better and admire him more after reading this biography, yet still find him enigmatic. Jauncey has certainly done well by his great-great uncle […] He writes of his own experiences as a means of exploring the fascination that Don Roberto still exerts, and the puzzle he continues to offer.
By God, it is an exceptional book, beautifully written, brilliantly researched, peppered with magnificent descriptive passages and acute judgments [...] highly enlightening.
It’s a terrific book, beautifully pitched, and measured carefully and very effectively with [the author's] own autobiographical parallels or contiguities shadowing or being buoyed up by the RBCG story. That makes it a very fond, yet also objectifying, nuanced and balanced, rather than coldly disinterested or implicitly biased, account.
[He] has woven the bare historical facts into something absorbing, merging his personal story with that of his famous relative… at last, ‘Don Roberto’ has come alive!
What really works is [the author's] own backstory. The fascinating, strangely illuminating, coincidences and echoes, the two strands matching each other snugly [...] The whole thing hangs together so well – a rip-roaring read as well as informative and thoughtful.
[A] fine portrait of one of the most fascinating Scots of his era
