THE ANGLER IN SCOTLAND

Keith Harwood's new book has recently been reviewed in Country Life:

'[an] eclectic and judicious new compilation . . . Critics of anthologies love to carp about what's left out . . . but here the well-read Keith Harwood has deliberately excluded most of the usual suspects . . . Notably he has included several passages about northern coarse and sea fishing, which less frequently see the light of day. Of the three-dozen extracts in this book, the liveliest are those period pieces that combine drama and immediacy with a deep sense of pleasure and leisure . . . . Not all are red-letter days . . . and many a fish gets away (not least Henry Lamond's which slithers from its package down a hill in central Glasgow). There are also historically unrepeatable triumphs, as the elegant Patrick Chalmers recalls 13 salmon from one pool on the North Esk or Stephen Johnson - writing from Stalag Luft III - quietly evokes the lost dusks of his boyhood among sea trout of Coruisk . . . Voices I scarcely knew included Major Ashley-Dodd (who visits Tweed as 'a very dicky cripple' during the First World War) and Dugald Macintyre, whose Hebridean companions assume he knows how to poach because he's a mainland gamekeeper . . . John Colquhoun, the canny laird of Luss, is another author worth resurrecting, as is that charming old Victorian, all rounder William Senior . . . This is definitely a volume to give your host when you next head north'

David Profumo, Country Life (August 2015)