This book is annotated with a rare extensive biographical sketch of the author, Andrew Lang, written by Sir Edmund Gosse, CB, a contemporary poet and writer. Mr. Kirk's little book was written in 1691 and was probably not printed until 1815, when an edition of only one hundred copies appeared at Edinburgh from the press of James Ballantyne & Company for Longman & Company of London. Mr. Kirk's book is the most curious imaginable. Written in 1691 by a Scotch divine, it is nothing less than a...

The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies opens as both a scholarly inquiry and an enchanted memorial, honoring the Rev. Robert Kirk while questioning the book's publication history and the possibility that the surviving 1815 text is the earliest true edition. Kirk emerges as a Highland minister, scholar, and seventh son whose life, work on Bible translation and Gaelic psalmody, marriages, children, and mysterious death have all been absorbed into the fairy legends he recorded. ...

This book offers the first in-depth intellectual and cultural history of British subversive propaganda during the Second World War. Focussing on the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), it tells the story of British efforts to undermine German morale and promote resistance against Nazi hegemony. Staffed by civil servants, journalists, academics and anti-fascist European exiles, PWE oversaw the BBC European Service alongside more than forty unique clandestine radio stations; they maintained a...

One of the most sought after and enigmatic texts about Celtic fairies. Written by a Scottish clergyman, Robert Kirk, in 1691, and not committed to print until the early 19th century, The Secret Commonwealth is an unusually sympathetic account of the denizens of fairyland, and a complex of still mysterious extrasensory phenomena including poltergeists, clairvoyance and doppelgangers.Magic was a part of everyday life for Kirk and his fellow Highlanders, and this remarkable book offer...

The tract, of which the reader now knows the history, is a little volume of somewhat singular character. Written in 1691 by the Rev. Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, it is a kind of metaphysic of the Fairy world. Having lived through the period of the sufferings of the Kirk, the author might have been expected either to neglect Fairyland altogether, or to regard it as a mere appanage of Satan’s kingdom—a “burning question” indeed, for some of the witches who suffered at Presbyterian han...

A classic, enchanting document of Scottish folklore about fairies, elves, and other supernatural creatures.Late in the seventeenth century, Robert Kirk, an Episcopalian minister in the Scottish Highlands, set out to collect his parishioners’ many striking stories about elves, fairies, fauns, doppelgängers, wraiths, and other beings of, in Kirk’s words, “a middle nature betwixt man and angel.” For Kirk these stories constituted strong evidence for the reality of a s...

"Kirk is a magnificent dish to set before any student of either folk-lore or folk-psychology."—Times Literary SupplementIn the late seventeenth century, a Scottish minister went looking for supernatural creatures of "a middle nature betwixt man and angel." Robert Kirk roamed the Highlands, talking to his parishioners and other country folk about their encounters with fairies, wraiths, elves, doppelgangers, and other agents of the spirit world. Magic was a part of everyday l...

Could robots be genuinely intelligent? Could they be conscious? Could there be zombies? Prompted by these questions Robert Kirk introduces the main problems of consciousness and sets out a new approach to solving them.He starts by discussing behaviourism, Turing's test of intelligence and Searle's famous Chinese Room argument, and goes on to examine dualism – the idea that consciousness requires something beyond the physical – together with its opposite, physicalism. Probing the id...

A great deal of work in philosophy today is concerned with some aspect of the complex tangle of problems and puzzles roughly labelled the mind-body problem. This book is an introduction to it. It is a readable, lucid and accessible guide that provides readers with authoritative exposition, and a solid and reliable framework which can be built on as needed. The first chapter briefly introduces the subject and moves on to discuss mechanism - the idea that minds are machines - focusing on Sea...

"Kirk is a magnificent dish to set before any student of either folk-lore or folk-psychology."—Times Literary SupplementIn the late seventeenth century, a Scottish minister went looking for supernatural creatures of "a middle nature betwixt man and angel." Robert Kirk roamed the Highlands, talking to his parishioners and other country folk about their encounters with fairies, wraiths, elves, doppelgangers, and other agents of the spirit world. Magic was a part of everyday l...

This book begins by providing a simplified version of the computational quantum chemistry sufficient to calculate the wavefunctions that are the basic input of NG-QTAIM. Enough basic (scalar) QTAIM theory is provided to understand the later chapters. In addition, our developments of scalar QTAIM are presented and activities at various levels of difficulty are provided for the readership to facilitate understanding.The topological origins of Quantum Theory of Atoms in Molecules (QTA...

This book is all about how companies are applying the key principles in International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and shows this by use of extensive examples of UK company accounts.The book provides coverage of the key points of each standard and links that with actual practice. It is not a detailed guidance book as such, or a transistion book from UK standards to IFRS, but a quick reference for the busy accountant which shows how to apply the key points of each standard b...