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“... Aberdeen philosopher Thomas Blackwell was writing that Homer was a ‘stroling indigent Bard’. Robert Burns liked that idea. In ‘Love and Liberty’ a bard sings alongside prostitutes and tinkers, and pronounces himself ‘Homer like’. Burns’s footnote (Burns enjoyed ...”

“... to forget that Crick ever set it. Nowhere is it more difficult to observe than in the matter of Robert Burns. Long ago, Edwin Muir said that ‘for a Scotsman to see Burns simply as a poet is almost impossible.’ Robert Crawford, himself an admired and graceful poet, writes on the ...”

“... Robert Burns wrote about art, friendship, religion, animals, drink, marriage and love. The First two and the last of these themes – poetry, sociability and sexual adventure, to call them by other names – commemorate activities which enabled him in youth, as did his drinking, to face the prospect of a lifetime’s hard labour on the land ...”

“... still rich in hints of the life savoured by its great authors, from Dunbar to Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch. The heyday of its literary, cultural and philosophic life lasted for a hundred years to the death of Scott and left its mark on Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie ...”

“... heavy drinking and writing was forged. When I thought of poetry I thought of drink. There was Robert Burns, after all, and his skirling, birling Tam O’Shanter. There was Hugh MacDiarmid and his drunk man looking at the thistle. And there were all those Scots poets meeting in Milne’s Bar in Edinburgh, pouring whisky down their necks and poison in ...”

“... both of them. The reverend had married a third time after Dorcas’s death. His new wife, Ophelia Burns, brought an adopted daughter (actually her niece), Shirley Ann, into the household. On a June evening in 1977 the 16-year-old took off for some reason, and, well: Ford Torino, roadside, insurance. This time the scene was staged to make it look as if the ...”

“... New York’s Guggenheim Museum contains in an annex a covert Robert Mapplethorpe gallery, a sober exhibition space which, like the masterpieces of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become ...”

“... of a town? Can you dedicate a book to a dot – two dots – on the map? The poet and academic Robert Crawford has a soft spot for nice spots and he dedicated his 1990 collection, A Scottish Assembly, ‘to Scotland’. Some countries and some cities – like some people – openly insist on being loved, and some of them behave as underdogs, which only ...”

“... the castle) and a Princes Street (with no prince); even in the 1960s, the statue of Robert Burns in the middle of the main street was surrounded by Highland dancers every Friday night. The Scottishness of Mackay’s Dunedin is more a matter of moral style than of civic life, and her New Zealand a place of lush temptations and hazards – of ...”

“... cultivated by Lady Morgan – as for Scotchness. Jane Austen was impressed by neither Glorvina nor Robert Burns, championing instead that model of quiet English moral sobriety Fanny Price. Brigid Brophy’s funniest piece is on fish, that silent persecuted majority, whom even hostesses who are delighted to provide a vegetarian meal (‘Oh, by the way, you ...”

“... Gaelic and Latin, Muir wrote in ‘Scotland 1941’, a poem of self-lacerating denunciation, that Burns and Scott were ‘sham bards of a sham nation’ where extreme Protestantism had led to ‘No pride but pride of pelf’ (the archaic noun ‘pelf’ is an example of the antiquarian diction and cadences that dog even his most powerful poems).By 1941 a ...”

“... a little. Madness: would you rise from the grave back through madness? It took you and left us Burns of the Night. Many jubilant returns: this at last is Robert Fergusson ...”

“... heroes from history, toilet articles and rival makes of bicycle’. In the ‘Good’ list were Robert Burns, Amundsen, and the Raleigh. My family favoured the counterparts from the ‘Bad’ list: Sir Walter Scott (‘would-be aristocrat, eventual bankrupt’), Captain Scott (‘English gent who took ponies, came second, died’), and the BSA. Deep ...”

“... He was the great man who was interested in great men. This could also be said of the modern poet Robert Lowell, a man of ‘tumbles and leaps’ and ‘manic crushes’ who was interested in the ‘great Boswell’ (so called by a Lady Lemon in 1792). At one point in the history of his elations and depressions Lowell was heard to speak of a trip to Scotland ...”

“... Alemannische Gedichte, which became very famous, earning him the reputation of a sort of German Robert Burns. Goethe admired the poems greatly, and Jean Paul declared he never tired of reading them. Thus when he took on the editorship of the Rheinländische Hausfreund he was already known as a writer; and soon the almanac was being read, and items ...”