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I've long respected Angus Calder's The People's War and The Myth of the Blitz as essential texts on the aerial bombardment of Britain 1940-41, and I'm placing Gardiner's book right next to them.

TO Corstorphine and a woodland burial site, where my old friend Angus Calder, Tollcross's Horace, was given a heartfelt send-off without any mention of God and a commendable absence of cant.

What makes all five children's laureates, Philip Pullman and more than 1,360 others sign an online petition? Age-banding - the idea that children's books should be labelled \"Suitable for 0-18 months\" and so on like clothes and toys with small parts. Quite right too (I've signed) - it's a dumb idea, which only serves lazy booksellers, librarians and publishers who can't be bothered to make proper recommendations. Children develop at different rates, and the stigma that would be created for a child who wasn't \"in-step\" with an arbitrary marketing ploy is unthinkable. It's an indefensibly ignorant idea. I doubt 13-year-olds will be surreptitiously swapping their \"15\" certificate copies of Catcher In The Rye, or that the Bible (rape, smiting, torture, smiting) will be classified as top-shelf material.

Calder had married, in 1963, Jenni, the daughter of the polymathic scholar David Daiches, another semi-exile, the couple both longing for home. They moved to Scotland in 1971. [Angus Calder] claimed that his \"return\" was triggered by encountering Scotland \"like a revelation\" when a Cambridge tutor invited the great folk singer Jeannie Robertson to a party where they sang folk songs and republican ballads all night. He was to write that he felt at home in the home he had not grown up in because of \"the sense of closeness across classes which persists to this day, I believe, in many contexts, can be seen in the evolution of Scottish Presbyterianism, in the practical, sociable character of our enlightenment. It can be discerned in Johnny Buchan's Toryism as clearly as in Jimmy Maxton's socialism.\" (1994) stress change and diversity and are not anti-English but cherish a republican spirit that, he believed, most English people lack or have lost. More scathingly he looked elsewhere to say: \"I like to imagine Scotland as a nation reasserting republican virtue against the corruption of the republican ideal in the US.\" He was a socialist and a nationalist but too free a spirit and sceptical ever to sign up to a party line. He believed that the written culture shapes the quality of life. Yet two or three years ago I used to dread his phone calls at two or three o'clock in the morning asking me urgently: \"What has gone wrong with the Labour party?\" But now I and others miss them. He did care.

ANGUS Calder, who has died from cancer aged 66, produced a book five years ago which had been in gestation for a long time, if not the whole of his life. Gods, Mongrels and Demons was subtitled \"101 Brief but Essential Lives\" and included \"oddballs, tinks, heidbangers, saints, keelies, nutters, philosophers, freaks and other personages\". This was the sort of company Calder kept and in which he would not have been unhappy to find himself a member. It was his father's \"exuberant non-career\", wrote Calder, that left him unconvinced by the notion that \"worthwhile\" people must follow \"persistent steady paths\". This example was followed by Angus Calder almost to the letter. Throughout his often chaotic life he followed his interests and passions and obsessions with almost total disregard for how they might affect him career-wise or domestically. \"I would like to live in an independent Scotland, \" wrote Calder in its introduction. But what would independence mean? \"More scones for tea? Finer mince with the tatties? Extra golf on Sundays? Better results for Scottish football teams in Europe? More than one broadsheet daily newspaper worth reading?\"

MY dear friend Angus Calder has died aged 66. Many a time and oft I have cursed him, usually before breakfast when he phoned in his cups to read out some lines of Yeats or remark generously or otherwise on gibberish I'd written. Oddly enough, I first encountered him early one morning when he was presenting programmes for the Open University which were broadcast before dawn broke.

The son of leading Scottish science writer, peace activist and academic (Lord) Peter Ritchie-Calder, he studied English at Cambridge and was a widely respected literary critic and cultural commentator. His post-graduate studies, however, led him towards modern history: his 1969 book, The People's War, was for many years the definitive book on Britain in the Second World War.

Tom Devine, professor of Scottish history and palaeography at Edinburgh University, said yesterday: \"In my own field he was a major figure but his creativity and contribution was much deeper than that. He was in a literary sense a renaissance man: his work covered poetry, editing and fiction. \" Calder is survived by his first and second wives, [Jenni Calder] and Kate, and by four children, a son and two daughters by his first marriage, and a son from his second.

This wildly idiosyncratic compendium comprises 100 mini- biographies of \"creatures who have extended my sense of the potentialities, both comic and tragic, of human character.\"

I was even surprised to learn that the most destructive bowler, fast or slow, in Australian cricket history was Bert Ironmonger (1882-1971) who had the astonishing figures of 74 wickets in 14 tests for an average of 17 runs. Interestingly he began his test career aged 46 and retired at 50. I was also pleased that [Angus Calder] was able, once and for all, to resolve the issue of actress Merl Oberon's (1911-1979) place of birth and her connections to Tasmania. It seems she visited here just once towards the end of her life. The purpose was to perpetuate a myth about her origins that her studio invented to enhance her exotic image. On her only visit \"she was given a civic reception and a theatre was named after her\". I wonder where?