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“... detailed and sometimes not-so-detailed arguments have been sharply questioned by the historian Robert Anderson. Davie’s emphasis on the importance of Scottish philosophical writings (among which he includes MacDiarmid’s verse) is designed to be controversial. It should be set beside the recent work of Alexander Broadie, to whose explorations of The ...”

“... been delighted that one of his admirers, Sheena Wellington, stole the show with her rendition of Burns’s ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’. Neat is a Cornish-born art historian, beekeeper and film-maker who moved to Scotland in the late 1960s. Between 1999 and 2002 he published five highly regarded oral histories of traditional Highland life and ...”

“... with working-class identification, that his poem ‘Gathering Dung’ is ‘as good as any since Burns’. He wants it all, not only success but virtue: ‘When I went back to my native town therefore it must be, not just as hero, aristocrat, and poet, but as absolver and redeemer.’ If the ego is monstrously inflated – ‘The men in my company called me ...”

“... willing to let him.’ A lot of CIA directors have written memoirs: Richard Helms, William Colby, Robert Gates, George Tenet, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, Michael Morell, John Brennan. We already have the memoir of the current CIA director, Bill Burns, but not that of his predecessor, Gina Haspel. Perhaps it would be too ...”

“... trotz alledem/Dass rings der Mensch die Bruderhand/dem Menschen reicht trotz alledem.’ It’s Robert Burns. ‘It’s coming yet, for a’ that,/That Man to Man the warld o’er/Shall brothers be for a’ that.’ The poet who translated it, Ferdinand Freiligrath, was soon driven out of Germany into exile. He was one of countless thousands across ...”

“... propagated Scottish notions of liberty, improvement, politeness and sentimentality. Rather as Robert Darnton a generation ago diverted scholarly attention from the philosophes to the printers, engravers and booksellers of Paris in The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the ‘Encyclopédie’, so Sher looks through all that Scottish mind ...”

“... Kenner and Davenport sent each other over the course of 44 years, copiously annotated by Edward Burns and cross-referenced at the end of each year, begins, politely and a bit tentatively, in March 1958: ‘Dear Guy, I hope subsequent activities haven’t yet sufficed to obliterate our Boston dinner last fall from your memory.’ The two had crossed paths ...”

“... there is nothing Scottish about any of them. Percy Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music Like Robert Louis Stevenson living in Samoa, like George MacBeth living in Sheffield, like Ian Brady living in Greater Manchester, I am a Scotsman living in exile; my father was the first of the family to fly South – my grandfather stayed, a Professor in ...”

“... Man. We might also point to Gregory Smith’s discussion of the so-called Editorial Theory about Burns. This theory sees the poet’s merit less in terms of his individual originality than in terms of his editing of given material. MacDiarmid’s oeuvre is a constant exploration of the tension between poet as creator and poet as editor. In his work, with its ...”

“... in Scotland, I took it for granted that linguistic diversity was integral to a national culture: Burns and MacDiarmid in Scots and English, Sorley MacLean in Gaelic – and Edwin Morgan veering into Loch Ness Monsterese and Mercurian.In this spirit, I edited or co-edited four anthologies during my thirties. All contained work in English, Scots and ...”

“... happened if, after sampling what the Big City offered, he had gone back to his native acres, as Burns did? A useless question. For one thing, Burns was, amazingly, short of worldly ambitions. And it never entered his mind to try to pare the claws of the contemporary literary lions and have them purring round his feet. No ...”

“... Rebellion of 1641 between them dominate the proximate causation of the English Civil War, and that Robert Burns mattered perhaps more than Cobbett and certainly more than Blake to the Northern English working class of the mid-19th century. But their work takes it for granted that English history is in effect self-contained: the American experiences of ...”

“... in the 18th century. The drawings are gathered together in The Four Books on Architecture (Robert Tavernor and Richard Schofield’s 1997 translation is the most recent), which are still a source for modern architects. Palladio’s origins may explain his books’ directness. He worked with his hands – he was a stone carver until he was 30 years old ...”

“... shift occurred and America emerged as the dominant world influence on the English language. Robert Burchfield, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, recently pointed out in the opening segment of the engaging BBC/PBS series The Story of English, that the centre of gravity of American English has itself shifted in the last generation from the ...”

“... and Carlyle’, begins: ‘The lives of the three greatest of Scottish imaginative writers – Burns, Scott and Carlyle – overlapped in an interesting and, for each successor, an influential manner.’ Carlyle himself could often be grudging in his tributes to his literary contemporaries, but he knew what he owed to Scott: ‘He understood what history ...”