AS POET, artist and above all film-maker Margaret Tait realised her vision of the world across many of the artificial boundaries in the arts.

JOHN BRANDON-JONES was an architect who flirted with modernism for a few months when a student, and then stood out against it for 70 years, because he felt that it was only a misunderstanding of the doctrines of Ruskin on which he had been brought up. His life and work presented an alternative to modern architecture that inspired others who instinctively went against the grain of post-war fashion and he went on to win a devoted following of admirers, partly through his enthusiasm for the late Victorian architects Philip Webb and C.F.A. Voysey.

WANTED: AN effective leader with proven business ability, good planning skills and team-building expertise. Love of penguins and sheep an advantage.

SCOTLAND

SO IT has been a poke in the eye for the control-freak tendency at Millbank. Although every party has claimed victory in the "super Thursday" elections the real winners were Dennis Canavan and Rhodri Morgan.

IT IS ONE of the Royal Navy's most sacred war graves. Torpedoed by a U-boat in 1939 with the loss of 833 lives, the battleship HMS Royal Oak lies beneath 90ft of water at the bottom of Scapa Flow in Orkney.

A FILM EDITOR is trying to find out whether a pronounced bump that gives his head the shape of a German soldier's coalscuttle helmet links him to a woman buried 5,000 years ago in a tomb in the Orkneys.

RALEGH RADFORD was the last of the prodigies of British archaeology from the 1930s and the years following the Second World War who, along with the like of Mortimer Wheeler, Christopher Hawkes and Gordon Childe, dictated the intellectual progress of the subject.

The Highlands teem with foreign lairds, bristling with anger at the ingratitude of their serfs

INFORMATION DESK: YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY OUR PANEL OF EXPERTS

Sarah Jewell samples a variety of festive favourites sure to tickle your tastebuds

The people of Orkney don't speak Gaelic (and never have), do have electricity and their eyebrows don't join in the middle. But could a mainlander tell you that?

The British are at a turning point. After 300 years the union of England and Scotland may be heading for the rocks; if devolution leads to divorce, the effects - on both countries - will be profound. The Scots voted for their own parliament, with tax-raising powers, one year ago. But contrary to expectation, the desire for independence seems to have been stimulated rather than dulled - support for the Scottish National Party has been growing ever since. This week, it holds what could be the most important party conference of its history. If it wins a majority of seats in the new parliament, Scots may well find themselves on the road to full-blown independence. This week's issue of the Sunday Review asks: just what is going on north of the border, politically, culturally and economically?

ALASTAIR DUNNETT, the editor of The Scotsman from 1956 to 1972, was passionately committed to working in Scotland; on separate occasions he declined the offer of the editorship of the Fleet Street titles the Daily Herald and The Sunday Times.