Ferdinand Mount, one-time policy chief in Mrs Thatcher's Downing St., like many a posh sounding Eton and Oxford Englishman turns out to have some good Scotch blood running through his veins and has written a book about the people who put it there.

His great-great-grandfather (whom he shares with David Cameron) was John Low of Clatto in Fife who at the age of 16 went off to join the East India Company and retired after a lifetime of service to the Empire as General Sir John Low, earning in his later years the privilege of going round the Old Course on the back of a pony. The earliest golf buggy known I imagine.

The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905 tells the fascinating story of the Low family's lives both personal and political over that century.  It's a story that is both romantic and brutal and Mount's talk had me gripped from start to finish.

There were stacks of copies of the book in Charlotte Square at £25 a pop but happily it's also available on-line in a substantially cheaper paperback edition provided you don't mind waiting till February.  I don't.

The novel Nora Webster that Colm Toibin was in Edinburgh to talk about is already out in paperback and most of the people in the audience had probably read it.  Those who asked questions certainly had.  According to The Guardian "This personal portrait of grief and politics in 1960s County Wexford does everything a great novel should".  I expect that is something along the Reithian lines of inform, educate, entertain.  I bought a copy so I'll let you know in due course.

Macbeth opens with the line "When shall we three meet again".  Youth Music Theatre UK keep the line but multiply the number of witches by three and not content with that have the whole company  of around fifty rush on-stage in the opening scene from behind the fences from where they have stared at us as we entered.

This is a very physical, fast-paced and inventive production.  The witches are wonderful, all nine of them, like rag dolls with jerky movements of heads and limbs.  They wield entangling ropes that suck in other characters.  There's a beautiful scene when Macbeth is trying to make up his mind to murder Duncan.  The witches swarm around him carrying shards of glass and shining torches on his face as he paces back and forth and as the scene ends he is left alone on-stage a shard having magically appeared in each hand.  Super stuff.

Every scene is well handled.  Inevitably with a large company of youngsters like this there are some weaker players but the overall achievement is high.  I found some of the music irritatingly over amplified for the strength of the actors' voices and the flute being played acoustically in one scene had no chance of being heard.  But that's to cavil.  

 At the end of the show they retreat to behind the fences and take up their initial positions.  We've just seen Malcolm make his final speech to the audience with Hecate at his shoulder as she was at Macbeth's when his tragic history started leaving us with the impression that history is about to repeat itself.

Arkle's  Much Ado About Nothing is a gender reversed production, except, confusingly, for the part of one member of the town watch.

The women are much more successful in playing men than the men are in playing women and nowhere is this better illustrated than in the case of Beatrice and Benedict.  If you were to design the perfect principal boy you'd come up with Bronagh Finlay and she has no trouble playing the military man.  Paul Beeson on the other hand is a perfectly decent actor but he's a big strapping chap and despite headscarf, long skirt and false boobs and excellent delivery of the lines he just fails to convince.

Maybe he's not meant to.  Maybe that's the point.  Maybe it's not some subtle comment on gender stereotyping.  Maybe it's just a joke at the expense of the lads that isn't quite as funny as Charley's Aunt.

Their other show, Bakersfield Mist, is much more straightforward.  An art expert, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been called in to assess whether a painting owned by a loud talking, hard drinking, trailer living, country music loving, husband free all American woman is or is not by Jackson Pollock.

She's convinced it is.  He says it's not. The stage is set for some entertaining and humorous conflict with here and there bouts of poignant mutual revelation.  It's not Shakespeare but it's fun.