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

Picasso among the Non-Entities

20 February 2014

Malcolm Bull paints himself into a corner in his strenuous argument with T.J. Clark about the meaning of Picasso’s Guernica (LRB, 20 February). Preoccupied with the Mediterranean-ness of the artist, he sinks in deep enough to raise the question, ‘Guernica, the greatest masterpiece of fascist art? Maybe not, but how much of it would have to be repainted to fit that description?’ Not much, he implies....
Letter

Thank God for the Leavisites

12 September 2013

T.J. Clark describes F.R. Leavis as having ‘been driven half-mad’ by 1961 (Letters, 10 October). This must have happened very quickly. Between 1954 and 1957 I listened to dozens of his lectures and heard him talking in many seminars and in conversations at his house and in my flat. He was rarely other than lucid, cogent, vivid and spirited. In October 1954, the first time I heard him, he defined...
Letter

Get a Real Degree

23 September 2010

The headlines ‘Down with Creative Writing’ and ‘Get a Real Degree’ apparently represent your view of this academic subject, if not quite Elif Batuman’s (LRB, 23 September). In the 40 years or so since I pioneered this discipline in British universities (at Lancaster, and with Malcolm Bradbury in East Anglia), I have not seen one reference to it in the press that was other than disparaging....
Letter

As Good as Pope

12 March 2009

It is a pity that Neal Ascherson, reviewing the latest Burns biography (LRB, 12 March), should have ‘opposed’ the poems to the songs and found the latter more ‘successful’. The best of the songs are excellent, from the radical pith of ‘A man’s a man’ to the wholehearted passion of ‘My Luve is like a red, red rose’. So are the best poems. Has Ascherson really pondered Burns’s poems...
Letter

Apparently it’s emetic

19 October 2006

John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins’s atheism as vacuous only because ‘atheist’ is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don’t believe (Letters, 30 November). No atheist is principally that. What we’d want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one...

Pieces about David Craig in the LRB

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...

Read more reviews

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,...

Read more reviews

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...

Read more reviews
See all contributors

Download the LRB app

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences