'Love makes the world go round? Not at all. Whisky makes it go round twice as fast.'
 
The hilarious story of wartime bootlegging in the Scottish islands. Wartime food rationing is bad enough, but when the whisky supplies run out on the Hebridean islands of Great and Little Todday, nothing seems to go right. Then the fifty-thousand-bottle cargo of the shipwrecked S. S. Cabinet Minister brings salvation - in its most giddily intoxicating form. Compton Mackenzie was born in West Hartlepool in 1883. He was educated at St Paul's School and Magdalen College, Oxford. During the First World War he became a Captain in the Royal Marines, becoming Director of the Aegean Intelligence Service. He wrote more than ninety books - novels, history and biography, essays and criticism, children's stories and verse, and was also an outstanding broadcaster. He founded and edited until 1961 the magazine the Gramophone , and was President of the Siamese Cat Club. He lived for many years on the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides, but later settled in Edinburgh. Compton Mackenzie died in 1972.