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 vivd 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.
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.
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!
[A] fine portrait of one of the most fascinating Scots of his era
I value Cunninghame Graham like rubies. We'll never see his like again.