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“... lust that knows no limit, no frustration, no prohibition and no death’. The Watcher by Charles Maclean, an Englishman’s novel set in the United States, has again to do with patterns. As in Pilgermann, they are huge patterns of cosmic significance centred on an individual life, discerned with excitement by a first-person narrator. This ...”

“... have helped to further the adventures of James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Jeeves, Billy Bunter and Charles Pooter; not forgetting, from an earlier age, Flashman and Rochester’s mad wife. In a class of their own come the surrogate writers who are authorised to enrich the leftovers of a dead storyteller. The late, prolific Alistair ...”

“... in Galicia was a famous sanctuary for royalist refugees, among them the future Louis XVIII and Charles X, and in August 1792, the month of the massacre at the Tuileries, Jan was entertaining her guests with sketches or parades, among them a satire on Jacobin oratory. There were Potockis on both sides of the desperate divisions in Poland; and when Jan’s ...”

“... in Glasgow, some notable acts of sedition, a riot in the town centre and the careers of John Maclean, James Maxton and the Red Clydesiders, ‘not one of the radicals of that era is represented among the statues of George Square.’ The riot caused the army to scramble its tanks (the only such time on mainland Britain) and to position snipers on the roof ...”

“... O’Brien is more Anglocentric: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is in facing-page English, but Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith, for example, occur only in English, and there is no Welsh-language poetry at all. On the other hand, O’Brien’s selection of English-language poetry casts a wider and more ambitious net. ‘Even as we study it, the map changes ...”

“... marginalised: James Connolly, Irish socialist executed for his part in the Easter Rebellion, John Maclean, idiosyncratic Scottish revolutionary socialist, and John Wheatley, an ILP’er from Glasgow and Minister of Health in the first Labour government. Like Foster and Woolfson, Howell is concerned with historical potentiality never realised, and is anxious ...”

“... in the 19th century: but for most people in England Scottish history means Mary and Prince Charles Edward, whose deaths, one of which was directly caused by England, are associated with ’87 and ’88. This setting in time is unfair on those of us who try to show that Scottish society had its own interesting line of development, a topic which neither ...”

“... of Grieve’s early life, so that we see, not only Grieve the friend of Red Clydesiders John MacLean and James Maxton, but also the Grieve whose Scottish nationalism was encouraged by his rejection by English girls. Heady on his home-brew of Nietzsche, John Davidson, and almost any other literary material he could devour, this proto-MacDiarmid emerges as ...”

“... is Mitford Man, seen plain. The irresistible Frenchman of Nancy Mitford’s fantasy – Fabrice, Charles Edouard – who knows how women’s lipstick should be applied, how long to a millimetre their skirts should fashionably be at any time, and exactly what they really want, at table and in bed, better than they know it themselves, is shown, as perhaps we ...”

“... 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 Gaelic. The two largest – The Penguin Book of Poetry from ...”

“... the pair (both provincials, of course) whom Kenner singled out as the most honourable exceptions: Charles Tomlinson, who applauded William Soutar, and Basil Bunting, who befriended MacDiarmid. Yet Tomlinson and Bunting are the true mavericks, as Kenner recognised. They are mavericks because, while acknowledging class-based and region-based resentment, in ...”

“... also made use of the ideas of European and North American anthropologists and historians such as Charles Letourneau, Lewis Henry Morgan and Henry Maine, who suggested that common ownership of land had been the basis of primitive society in most countries before its replacement by capitalist relations of production. In monthly pieces in the ISRP’s ...”

“... of the sanguinary career of Tamerlane for the Time-Life History of the World. After my editor, Charles Boyle, had read the first draft, he went home and dreamed a strange dream in which ‘Old Hoppity’ turned up at Time-Life’s London offices. The dream, in time, metamorphosed into a poem, which he included in his collection The Very Man (1993). It ...”

“... between Egypt and the rest of Africa had earlier been set out by the radical French scholars, Charles François Dupuis and Constantine de Volney, at the end of the 18th century, while the idea of Egypt as the source of Greek and hence of Western civilisation was the conventional wisdom at that time, and had been proclaimed with particular fervour by the ...”

“... the former and 28.7 per cent of the latter were killed. The death rate in bombers was exceptional. Charles Whiting, in his ’45: The Final Drive from the Rhine to the Baltic, provides repulsive detail which makes such statistics all too vivid. Eight months after D Day, one company of the 2nd Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders had just three men left out of ...”