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“... Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham is one of the puzzles in Scottish literary history. Born in London in 1852, son of a Scottish laird of distinguished ancestry, he spent a considerable part of his youth on his estates, where he developed a strong affection for the Scottish landscape and Scottish traditions. His mother was half-Spanish and he learned Spanish as a child from his Spanish grandmother ...”

“... his correspondence with one or more persons – for example, Edward Garnett, William Blackwood and Cunninghame Graham. Early letters to Polish friends and relations have been translated, and a series of about a hundred to Marguerite Poradowska appeared in the original French. However, it seems that ‘more than a third of Conrad’s extant correspondence ...”

“... the psychoanalytic biography by Bernard Meyer; the impeccable edition of Conrad’s letters to Cunninghame Graham by C.T. Watts; certain key articles by Ian Watt – and this is not to mention the many critical works which incorporated biographical material, such as Eloise Knapp Hay’s The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad, and Edward Said’s Joseph ...”

“... about a writer’s life, which are the dominating theme of his letters, are quite agonising. To Cunninghame Graham he writes, 16 February 1898: ‘Cher ami, I did not write because I was beastly seedy – nerve trouble – a taste of hell.’ To William Blackwood, 12 April 1900: ‘A dog’s life! this writing out, this endlessness of effort and this ...”

“... and never drew rein’ at the first hint of fisticuffs. He quoted with appreciation R.B. Cunninghame Graham, who said that Shaw was ‘the first man to run away from Trafalgar Square on Bloody Sunday’. (Cunninghame Graham went to prison as a result of the riot.) This is all of a piece with Shaw, once ...”

“... first man suspended for saying ‘damn’ in the Commons seems to have been that flamboyant Scot, Cunninghame Graham, then Liberal Member for South Lanark. Lord Vansittart is surely the only British diplomat to have written a play in French and seen it run for four months in Paris. Joe Orton and his friend got six months for defacing library ...”

“... about ‘the human condition’ who were deeply influenced by him – Gide, Malraux, Camus, Graham Greene – are notably lacking in this sort of homely and instinctive expertise; they are ‘writers’ pure and simple. Conrad was certainly a born writer in one sense, and yet he might easily never have become one had he not invested his skill and ...”

“... account, then, already turns fact towards fiction; and when Conrad’s eccentric Scots friend Cunninghame Graham came in 1920 to plagiarise Os Sertoes in A Brazilian Mystic he spun the yarn further by more fictionalisings and distortions (and at times simple misunderstandings) of his Portuguese model. Cunha had written of the Canudos campaign that ...”

“... aristocrats, writers and working people, in a constant mix. Conrad’s favourite writer, R.B. Cunninghame Graham, the Scottish laird – the real king of Scotland, some say – spent several years in San Antonio, attempting to become a cattle baron, going broke, and then, out of desperation, beginning his writing career with an account of a hanging ...”

“... at a rate of around 600,000 a year.The vilification and spite of the Italian in his (as R.B. Cunninghame Graham wrote) ‘greasy velveteen suit’ is not Rilke’s style, and his thought is not for the pristine land and people yonder, in which in some sense he did not even believe. Is this really what they’ve signed on for? And is this really ...”

“... Roger Casement brings out the best in him; he was most at ease with men of action like Casement or Cunninghame Graham. His letters to the press – for example, a protest against the precensorship of plays – can’t compare with Shaw’s on similar issues. If necessary, we can remind ourselves that he was in most respects a greater artist than Shaw, and ...”

“... evidence – but, in any case, he did not want to get involved. He wrote to his friend R.B. Cunninghame Graham: He is a Protestant Irishman, pious too. But so was Pizarro. For the rest I can assure you that he is a limpid personality. There is a touch of the conquistador in him too; for I have seen him start off into an unspeakable wilderness ...”