In the spring of 1749, having made his peace with God, an old man was dying. His bed lay amid the remains of a burnt-out thatched cottage on the southern shore of Loch Rannoch in Perthshire. So was ending the life of Alexander Robertson, 13th of Struan, one of the most famous - some would say notorious - men in Scotland. James Irvine Robertson's biography of Alexander Robertson, 13th of Struan, conveys as few others, the passionate feelings that the Stuart risings evoked in the Highlands over a century of political and armed conflict.