“... funeral, was going to write his biography) tried to claim him too. Then the poets took over: Hugh MacDiarmid, Hamish Henderson and Sorley Maclean saw Maclean as synthesising nationalism and internationalism (you could go on adding Caledonian antisyzygies, as Bell does: Highlander and Lowlander, atheist and Calvinist, hero and fool, teacher and ...”

“... predictable than others: the Union of the Parliaments (1707), the Scottish Renaissance embodied in MacDiarmid and Grassic Gibbon (1922-35), the flow of oil and gas from the bed of the North Sea (1977-?). It may be that our nationalism is on a par with feminism as Dale Spender sees it: for ever having to be painfully rediscovered, rather than evolving ...”

“... remained obscure right up to his death. The man who wrote the preface to the first volume of Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry, and also told the Commons in 1932 – much to his own party’s embarrassment – that if the Scots wanted home rule they should have it, fits into no Clubland category. If Buchan’s identity was veiled in the Sixties, ‘Our ...”

“... and salmon in peaceful Northern waters, and he was lavishly praised by Priestley, Harold Nicolson, Hugh Walpole, Storm Jameson and Sean O’Faolain. So what else did the poor man want? He wanted to be deeply admired. He wanted to be rated a most excellent and serious writer by the most exacting and serious critics. I never thought of him in that way, although ...”

“... stolidity ... obsol.’. Kenneth Burlay, in his dispassionate and frequently very funny piece on Hugh Mac-Diarmid’s predecessors and contemporaries (‘An Awkward Squad’), shows how poets, too, sometimes felt obliged to adopt a humble persona when writing in Scots. The poets, like Lorimer, were faced with difficulties in using Scots: some of them used ...”

“... also means the popular and the recondite, are characteristic of the poetry of any age. But, as Hugh Kenner points out in a typically brilliant if somewhat perverse essay called simply ‘Responsibilities’, Davie’s concern for poetic language is really a concern for culture as the modern equivalent of theology. ‘The Englishman who was pulled in the ...”

“... are remarkably sonorous), but their difficulty prompted unenthusiastic reviews, including Hugh MacDiarmid’s dismissive description of Graham as ‘an adolescent playing with the materials of great poetry’. 2ND Poems, published in 1945, continued in much the same non-representative, non-functional vein. Graham was preoccupied with encouraging ...”