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Edinburgh: Reid, David . Very Good/Very Good. 1982. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 0707303044 Dust jacket complete. Black cloth with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership inscription. 221 pages clean and tight. The Party-Coloured Mind is a prose anthology organized about the central issue of Scottish seventeenth-century history, the conflict between Church and State, since, however indirectly, that is what Scots wrote most interestingly about. Such writing is usually rather inaccessible to the general reader, first because it requires some historical background. To supply that, the pieces have been arranged chronologically, prefaced with a historical outline in headnote form, and some of the pieces themselves are racy memoirs that bring events or personalities to life. But the central issue is itself culturally and intellectually inaccessible. Why did Scotsmen care so much about the politics of Church and State? Here, the pieces offer some explanations in terms of divine or human authority, conscience or the social order, and cast light on each other. At their best they show something that we can recognise as the life of the mind in pre-Enlightenment Scotland, in spite of the narrowness and fanaticism that took hold of so much national life. This anthology should give the literary historian a fair idea of the state of Scottish literature in the century between the Reformation and the Enlightenment, in its very incompleteness suggesting lines worth pursuing, and it should furnish students of history with a cultural background written by men of the age. Jacket design by John Mc William .