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“... Old men can be buggers at hanging on. Hamish Henderson, who died last March at the age of 82, hung on firmly through three books, edited by others: his writings on ‘Song, Folk and Literature’, collected as Alias MacAlias (1992), a selected letters, The Armstrong Nose (1996) – both edited by Alec Finlay – and Collected Poems and Songs, edited by Raymond Ross ...”

“... There are those, even among his friends, who remember Hamish Henderson as a chaotic figure who could most often be found soliloquising in Sandy Bell’s, a favourite pub near Edinburgh University. Was he one of the ‘lowest of men’, spilling whisky and sliding off his stool as he launched into another ballad? Or was he a seer, defying body and convention to ‘soar like an eagle’ in the way of the blessed inebriate in Richard Thompson’s song ‘God Loves a Drunk’ (‘His shouts and his curses they are just hymns and praises/To kick-start his mind now and then’)? Timothy Neat writes not in order to leave his late friend in a heap on the floor, least of all the floor of the hostelry that Henderson had long since helped to establish as ‘the hub of the Scottish Folk Revival ...”

“... treatment of the desert war in the work of such Scottish poets as George Campbell Hay, Hamish Henderson and Edwin Morgan. There is a pained, grim quality to some of MacLean’s verse – seen in the impulse which leads him to translate the first 26 lines of Paradise Lost into Gaelic, appending after the last line (‘And justify the ways of ...”

“... Scots prose guaranteed its demise. Both Thomas Crawford, writing on 18th-century Scots verse, and Hamish Henderson, on the ballads, stress the interplay between Scots and English. While the poetry Crawford deals with does not, perhaps, travel well outside of Scotland, his sympathetic and honest account of it puts it in a good light; he miraculously ...”

“... way somewhere else; but not surprisingly, the population loves it. The city’s late, great poet Hamish Henderson spent the latter part of his life on the edge of the Meadows, which often figures in his writing. In ‘Floret silva undique’ (‘the forest flowers all about’) he depicts the politics of life itself washing constantly over the ...”

“... might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by Polygon in 1990) falls on the right side of the 1945 divide, is surprisingly absent, the more so as he was one of the founders of Scottish studies in the early Fifties. If these are ...”

“... was always a sine qua non for Chinese visitors – and the well-known folklorist and writer Hamish Henderson gathered half a dozen, for a lively evening’s discussion; one topic that came up was whether Lallans is a distinct language or not. We laid in a stock of beer for the occasion, on a tactful hint from ...”

“... by a majority of more than 400.) In the same desert battles as Douglas’s, another poet, Hamish Henderson, would introduce his Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (1942-47, published 1948) with most un-Douglas-like vocabulary and implication, speaking of ‘that eternally wronged proletariat of levelling death in which all the fallen are ...”

“... period from 1910 up to his imprisonment in 1926: and two editions of the Letters from Prison by Hamish Henderson and Lynne Lawner (1974 and 1975). In 1981 Lawrence and Wishart plan to publish a fourth volume in their series of selections, this time from Gramsci’s abundant articles and notes on literature and cultural life. The impact of this ought to ...”

“... high accomplishment as Gavin Ewart and Henry Reed, Norman Cameron and Robert Garioch, Roy Fuller, Hamish Henderson and Sorley Maclean – and many others wholly unknown to fame. It’s true that sensitive annotation of individual experience was the hallmark of their generation of writers. Owen and Rosenberg had, in a sense, already ‘said it ...”

“... conscience has tended to needle only after wealth and opportunity have run out. When, in 1960, Hamish Henderson sang that ‘broken families in lands we’ve herriet/Will curse Scotland the brave nae mair, nae mair’ he was expressing a hope that Scots would become better global citizens, even as America’s Polaris missiles arrived at their new home ...”

“... 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 ...”