EIBF - Monday 22nd August

From 1066 to the War of the Roses and the Battle of Waterloo, from the Great War to the Falklands and Iraq, conflicts continue to define and redefine our history. Acclaimed historian Angus Konstam reveals why military history dominates the nonfiction shelves.

In Domination and Lordship, Oram has penned a history of Scotland from 1070 to 1230, offering an analysis of the importance of Gaelic culture and exploring Scotland's role as both dominated and dominator. In The Killing Time, Ross tackles 1638 and 1707, a period which helped to mould modern Scotland and a time of warfare, political chicanery and moments of national triumph before the Union with England. Ross merges history and biography to enlighten us.

'The Atlantic was always a presence in our lives, and many of us looked out there…into the old religious Irish past, as well as the new America.' So wrote Andrew O'Hagan of his Ayrshire upbringing. Currently adapting his 1995 debut novel The Missing, to be staged by the National Theatre of Scotland this Autumn, O'Hagan has been invited by them to write a lecture about how our understanding of places in general – and Scotland in particular – depends on shared memories. This event is part of Staging the Nation, a wider conversation about theatre in Scotland. Introduced by Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland.

In his landmark 2000 publication The Business of Books, the renowned New York publisher André Schiffrin described what he believed to be a crisis in Western publishing. The man who had helped bring the likes of Pasternak and Foucault to America no longer felt he could work in the commercial mainstream. Now Schiffrin has turned his attention to the wider crisis of the media. He compares the crisis in the US to Europe, demonstrating how the American corporate model has extended its reach across the globe, and considers what might safeguard the future of publishing, bookselling and the press. In association with Publishing Scotland and the Scottish Universities Insight Institute Independent Publishing Programme.

In recent years it has seemed that nuclear has been gaining the upper hand over renewables, in the battle to replace fossil fuels as our primary source of energy. But the disaster at Fukushima in Japan earlier this year has given the debate a sharp new perspective. How can we weigh up the costs and risks of the different options? Passions will run high in this discussion with Tim Radford, award-winning science writer, leading Scottish poet John Burnside, and a third speaker to be confirmed. Sold Out