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“... Monday. A pre-recorded announcement, a few words of welcome in Gaelic then the safety stuff in English, hangs in the air behind the departing ferry. Little else is moving but the clouds, and water slapping on the concrete slipway, and bottle-brown fronds of bladderwrack. There will be another sailing to Mull in an hour or so. A car arrives, with Monaco numberplates ...”

“... There were eagle pellets on the summit of the Stack of Glencoul, spherical, the size of golf balls, composed of matted fur and bones. We’d seen an eagle earlier, soaring in the distance, and the summit of the stack was a nice scenic spot to regurgitate. It commanded a view, if eagles cared, down Loch Glencoul and its surrounding hills, out over Eddrachillis Bay to the waters of the Minch, with the Isle of Lewis away in the distance ...”

“... A situation has arisen on Ben Nevis. I don’t mean a rescue, although as it happens the RAF and mountain rescue teams are bringing down a man and two boys who, the report says, ‘didn’t read the weather forecast’. The situation I have in mind has also arisen on Snowdon and Scafell, and it concerns the dead. Apparently, the biggest hills are covered in so many memorials – plaques and little cairns – that it’s becoming an issue ...”

“... Under the gutter of our house are many cobwebs, each attached at a slightly different angle to the wall. It’s an east-facing wall, so on sunny mornings the cobwebs are alight. A whole quarter of cobwebs, like an Eastern bazaar or a medieval marketplace with all the cobblers, all the spice sellers, all the drapers together in the same alley. The biggest measured about a handspan and a half ...”

“... the book’s hold. It wasn’t just the guns but the increasing number of accidents. How much time Kathleen Raine spent at Sandaig is also unknown, because she threw her diaries into a river, and when he came to write his book, Maxwell excised her, though ‘ring of bright water’ was her line – the most famous one she ever wrote. Her poem, without a title ...”

“... I hacked off the gannet’s head with my penknife, which turned out to be one of those jobs you wish you’d never started. It was a Swiss Army knife, with a blade only two inches long, and a diving gannet can enter the water at ninety miles an hour: they have strong necks. It was early morning, low tide, and I was glad to have the beach to myself. When the head was at last free, I rolled the body with my foot ...”

“... Mid-December. It was eight in the morning and Venus was hanging like a wrecker’s light above the Black Craig. The hill itself – seen from our kitchen window – was still in silhouette, though the sky was lightening to a pale yellow-grey. It was a weakling light, stealing into the world like a thief through a window someone forgot to close. The talk was all of Christmas shopping and children’s parties ...”

“... For Kathleen Jamie Waist-height, clouds of white lace in the abandoned graveyard, the delicate, filigree umbels matching the thumbprints of lichen embroidering the graves. A deep current of blue surges below – bluebells, moments of sky fallen, brief weather fixed on wet stems, conjuring a climate gone from this chill April dusk, as rain comes, and light fades ...”

“... their true maturity … Let’s just say I’m keeping my ‘Yes’ badge safe in the button tin. Kathleen Jamie Project Fear​ has had a temporary victory in Scotland but its legacy will not be a return to the status quo ante either in Scotland or elsewhere. The mind of the Scottish nation has stirred to new activity. Every single parliamentary ...”

“... preoccupied by gender. It is a theme crucial equally to Duncan McLean’s novel Bunker Man and to Kathleen Jamie’s poetry collection The Queen of Sheba. It is insistent in W.N. Herbert’s poem ‘Featherhood’ and Janice Galloway’s Foreign Parts. It bridges writing as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and ...”

“... very little; it’s easy play. Before, I wonder how you will be. Will you feel like talking about Kathleen or the babies? It is like listening to one half of a telephone conversation. When not chatting, Clary tends to declaim: ‘I was born into my skin and its future, the planet and its promise or demise. Each day a similar sun, the almost predictable moods ...”

“... The essays in ‘Heaven-Taught Fergusson’ are interspersed with poems on him by, among others, Kathleen Jamie, Edwin Morgan and Les Murray. This is an elegant echo of Ruddiman’s Weekly Magazine, in which many of Fergusson’s poems first appeared, and where verse was juxtaposed with essays, articles and correspondence. Fergusson is much admired by ...”

“... much of whose work Watson’s polyglot anthology is so in tune? They’re missing entirely – no Kathleen Jamie or W.N. Herbert or Don Paterson. Liz Lochhead is the only poet under the age of 50 to be included. The youngest Gaelic poet here is nearly 70. The forked tongues of the newer Scottish poets have been brutally chopped. Watson is strongest in ...”

“... childless person sits at a table writing, Not far away from a picture of colossal stellar clouds. Kathleen Jamie’s The Queen of Sheba has been shortlisted for so many prizes that it must be one of the most widely appealing recent volumes of poetry. From a narrower, but longer perspective, it is the best individual collection written by a woman in ...”

“... little anxiety in the younger poets, such as Robert Crawford, Liz Lochead, W.N. Herbert, Kathleen Jamie and Jackie Kay, who have learned from him. In Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity, Colin Nicholson tries to account for his many-sided subject by examining him facet by facet, but the result is rather less than the sum of its (sometimes ...”