“Richly entertaining and perceptive. A revelation for pipers like me, and for anyone interested in how an instrument can transform culture.”

About Richard McLauchlan

Richard McLauchlan is a Scottish writer with a passion for making the past live vividly in the present, and for exploring the intellectual and cultural traditions of the West.

Educated at the Universities of St Andrews and Cambridge, Richard's PhD was on the austere but spiritually luminous poetry of R.S. Thomas and was published as Saturday's Silence by the University of Wales Press in 2016.

After a formative year living in Germany – busking with his bagpipes on the streets of Cologne and learning the language – Richard co-founded the charity Light Up Learning in 2015, with the aim of igniting a love of learning in those most at risk from disengaging from education. LUL now provides life-changing, one-on-one mentoring to over 170 young people in schools across Edinburgh, the Lothians and the Borders every week. Richard's historical work began with his collaboration with John Campbell on Haldane: The Forgotten Statesman Who Shaped Modern Britain (Hurst, 2020), which became a Sunday Times ‘Politics and Current Affairs Book of the Year’ and a Telegraph ‘Best Book of the Year’. He then published Serious Minds (Hurst, 2022), a biography of the wider Haldane family, showing them to be one of Britain's most extraordinary intellectual dynasties, on a par with the Darwins and the Keyneses.

His new book The Bagpipes: A Cultural History (Hurst, 2025) is the first accessible cultural history of the instrument ever to be written. It aims to change the prevailing perceptions of this strange conflation of bag and sticks, showing the instrument's remarkable diversity and ubiquity, as well as trying to understand its continuing capacity to evoke the deepest responses in the human person.

2026 will see the release of The Indefinable School: The Story of The Edinburgh Academy 1974-2024 (Polaris Publishing), Richard's account of the past fifty years at one of the most iconic - and, in recent times, controversial - schools in Scotland's capital. Published shortly after the Academy's bicentennial year, this will serve as the second volume of the school's history to accompany Magnus Magnusson's The Clacken and the Slate of 1974.

Richard lives in Haddington, East Lothian, with his wife and two young boys.