“The story of a remarkable Scottish family set against the great sweep of Scotland’s history . . . [a] remarkable piece of research” (Magnus Linklater, former Scottish editor of The Times).
 
The Haldanes have been in Scotland for over eight hundred years, and their story illustrates many of the defining themes of Scotland’s history. Haldanes played significant roles in the Bruce war of independence, the political upheavals which accompanied the establishment of the Stewart dynasty, the religious struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Darien Scheme and the Act of Union, the Jacobite rebellions, the development of the East India Company, and in the theological controversies of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, Haldanes are still to be found in the public eye with some influence on matters of national significance.
 
In this book, Neil Stacy follows the fortunes of the family, highlighting the extraordinary contributions they have made in so many areas, as well as uncovering some of the more colorful episodes in the family’s history, such as long-buried secrets of romance in the teeth of parental opposition, a military career threatened by a youthful liaison with a blackmailing barmaid, and an attempt to run a temperance hotel in the western Highlands which ended in high farce.
 
“For producing so many individuals of unusual distinction there can be few families to rival the Haldanes of Gleneagles. Neil Stacy does them proud, he relates their 900-year saga with clarity and wit.” —John Keay, author of India: A History
 
“I had expected to be intrigued and entertained by this comprehensive history of the Haldanes of Gleneagles; and I was, abundantly.” —Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh