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“... have the distinction ‘of being the oldest in any European vernacular’. In Scotland, since Hugh MacDiarmid, and in Ireland, since Sean O Riordain, there has been a renaissance of poetry in the old language. John Montague sees this renaissance embodied in the person and work of Sorley MacLean (Somhairle Mac Gill-Eain). Montague’s essay is a ...”

“... Such is the price of maintaining the sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament. (Small wonder that Hugh MacDiarmid considered Scotland’s experience within the UK to be colonial in nature.) Of course, this would not be a happy situation. The UK Parliament would be overriding Scotland’s competing continuity bill and, by enacting its withdrawal ...”

“... encouraged a scepticism towards the English cult of Anglican royalism in poets from Burns through MacDiarmid to Douglas Dunn. Paulin’s anthology further castigates English provincialism with doses of foreign poetry. The most immediately striking feature of the book’s semiotics is its tribute to French republicanism: the cover picture shows the Bastille ...”

“... Oedipal ‘anxieties of influence’ among their successors, ever exist, Kelman has succeeded Hugh MacDiarmid as Scotland’s ‘strong’ writer of the century. Affirmation of the culture is one thing – and inasmuch as it invests writers with confidence and pride, a very good thing. But to move beyond mere affirmation and into artistic synthesis ...”

“... spanning almost forty years: on Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of Davie’s poems. If we were to read the ...”

“... has thrown up no new facts about the firm’s dealings with, for instance, Stephen Crane or Hugh MacDiarmid. The House of Blackwood was not just a business concern but a major cultural presence, an ‘institution’, and it is here that Finkelstein’s rather contracted vision lets him down. The dust jacket promises insights into the firm’s ...”

“... may merely be poetic callisthenics to keep him fit until his next burst of creative energy.’ Of Hugh MacDiarmid in 1962: ‘He has managed a curious creative amalgam of old and new, uniting great feeling for his country, its traditions and language, with the strengths of the ideal modern industrial man: virile, unaffected, passionate.’ Of Dryden: he ...”

“... highlight the relative open-mindedness of the Criterion, which actively courted the Communist Hugh MacDiarmid, was mutedly enthusiastic about Maynard Keynes, and by its final phase was publishing Auden, Spender and the Surrealists. He organises his study partly by investigating the journal’s intricate relations to surrounding periodicals (the ...”

“... while Basil Bunting, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both books of Stephen Spender suggests that he has slipped out of contention – either because his true ...”

“... that’s why I keep on singin’ baby My hymns to the silence ... No one who knows the poems of Hugh MacDiarmid will miss the connection, a contemplative mystique of the absolute. However, MacDiarmid also tried to make himself the voice of a nation, and Morrison is nothing like that for Protestant Ulster people. He ...”

“... to these standing stones and circular cairns that punctuate the fields. In the manner of Hugh Miller, stonemason and essayist, the grain of Ascherson’s thinking is apt to spark off these heathen formations, these ‘ritual spires of condensed fear and memory’, as he calls them, and a melancholic attitude accompanies the notion that the modern age ...”

“... which constituted the Rose Street milieu of 1950s Edinburgh. For a time, Brown mixed there with Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Sydney Goodsir Smith and other poets and literati. With its prostitutes and smoky, male-dominated pubs sporting signs which stated ‘Women Not Supplied’, Rose Street was a shithole of gender politics, emblematic in some ...”

“... man’, and derided Spender and Auden as lightweights when compared with ‘the redoubtable Hugh MacDiarmid’. He interrupted establishment speakers, organised demonstrations, wrote ‘Songs of Sabotage and Sedition’ and, when the war started, campaigned against its extension into a global conflict that could be settled only by the total defeat ...”

“... and squeamishness towards humankind’. On the other hand, he appealed strongly to the young Hugh MacDiarmid, who met him in London and regarded him as ‘a mighty master’. From ‘what is inevitable and therefore true’, it is a short step to: What maitters’t wha we kill To lessen that foulest murder that deprives Maist men o’ real ...”

“... entry into Scotland’s intellectual pantheon, formalising Nairn’s place alongside figures like Hugh MacDiarmid, Muriel Spark and Ascherson himself. Ascherson is keen that this process of national canonisation should not become one of pacification and moderation. Disputing Eric Hobsbawm’s suggestion, quoting Lenin, that Nairn simply ‘painted ...”