David Craig

David Craig, who died in 2021, taught creative writing at Lancaster. As well as poetry and fiction, he wrote books about climbing, such as Native Stones, and On the Crofters’ Trail and The Glens of Silence, about the Highland Clearances.

Letter

The Clearances

22 January 1987

SIR: I am not sure how old a horror has to be, in Angus Calder’s view (Letters, 5 March), before it is no longer worth rehearsing. Should we stop talking about the Holocaust in, say, 2050, the Soviet farm collectivisation in 2000, and the Somme any time now? But if the rehearsing is being done at all – as it is, after all, by Smout, Richards, and the other historians whom he favours – then it...
Letter

Rogue Socialists

1 September 1988

Michael Mason claims that historians have found traces of Francis Place the radical ‘scattered and faint’, apart from the archive under his name in the British Museum. But it is far from a faint and scattered impression and knowledge of the man and his wonderfully cunning career on the left of English politics during the Reform period that we get from Graham Wallas’s Life, which was reprinted...
Letter

Facts and Folk

5 January 1989

David Craig writes: I notice that in reply to my criticism of her view of the Highland Clearances Rosalind Mitchison doesn’t defend the phrases of hers that I disputed: namely, that the 19th-century burnings of crofters’ houses were a ‘cliché’, ‘in some instances untrue’, and ‘heavy with myth’. What else can these words mean but that the crofters’ stories about the burnings tend...
Letter
C.H. Sisson (LRB, 9 November), following Charles Hobday, may well be right in saying that, broadly speaking, Edgell Rickword’s poetry ‘virtually ceased in 1931’, but what this broad speaking leaves out is the powerful and substantial satire on the occasion of the Spanish Civil War, ‘To the Wife of a Non-Interventionist Statesman’. This was published in the Left Review for March 1938 and saw...
Letter

Distaste for Leavis

11 October 1990

So Frank Kermode (LRB, 11 October) shares with Noel Annan an ‘acute distaste’ for F.R. Leavis. This must be the twentieth sideswipe at Leavis which I’ve noticed in the papers over the past five years. Each time the unargued jab has almost roused me to defence. Does Leavis need defending? His books remain in print and must continue to inspire and educate. How disappointing that the man now regarded...

Auchnasaugh

Patrick Parrinder, 7 November 1991

David Craig has an unfashionable concern with truth-telling in fiction. In his earlier role as a literary critic, he wrote a book called The Real Foundations in which he showed how some of the...

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Highland Hearts

V.G. Kiernan, 20 December 1990

‘Just inside the fir-dusk a hollow oblong of stones now showed, brown and damp with that stupefied or browbeaten look of an abandoned croft-house ... Here was Unnimore.’ Here, too,...

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Triermain Eliminate

Chauncey Loomis, 9 July 1987

I admire mountain, rock and ice-climbing from a respectful distance. When young and foolish, I tried it. I even went up what some experienced climbers call ‘the milk run’ to the peak...

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