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“... entry into Scotland’s intellectual pantheon, formalising Nairn’s place alongside figures like Hugh MacDiarmid, Muriel Spark and Ascherson himself. Ascherson is keen that this process of national canonisation should not become one of pacification and moderation. Disputing Eric Hobsbawm’s suggestion, quoting Lenin, that Nairn simply ‘painted ...”

“... and general élitism at the English end of the Anglo-American literary tradition. At least when Hugh MacDiarmid published his late, late laments he could see the funny side, and had the good taste to call them things like ‘England is our Enemy’. The most interesting ‘small coterie’, incidentally, currently boiling its mighty stock in the ...”

“... He supported women’s suffrage and helped establish the National Library of Scotland; Hugh MacDiarmid became a friend. As an MP, from 1927, he looked into education and workers’ rights. His manor house in Elsfield, outside Oxford, was open to guests of all political persuasions: A.L. Rowse, then a socialist; T.E. Lawrence, who looked ...”

“... generations after the fear-thollaidh nan tighean (‘destroyer of homes’) has cleared the place. Hugh MacDiarmid likened it to the silence ‘heard’ through a doctor’s stethoscope when a baby has died in the womb. Fences partition the grasslands of a shallow dale. The links of a river wind glistening towards the sand-dunes. In the newish graveyard I ...”

“... me from being a “bard” at all.’ He was cheerily scornful of the poetry of the top bard, Hugh MacDiarmid, which he considered to be made out of ‘Plastic Scots’. MacDiarmid, meanwhile, ticked off Graham for allowing ‘non-Scottish’ influences to shape his work, so that it failed to address ‘the crucial ...”

“... have much use for the work of his contemporaries and juniors (his fellow Celts David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid were partial exceptions), but was on the whole pleasant about it. A breezy manner (‘Unabashed boys and girls may enjoy them. This book is theirs’), a few eclectic names ...”

“... A not unrelated desire to reclaim Dunbar as a Scottish rather than an English-inclined writer led Hugh MacDiarmid to exclude ‘The Thrissill and the Rois’ from his Selected Dunbar of 1952. But, as with Irvine Welsh, Dunbar’s use of things ‘Inglisch’ is self-conscious, thoughtful and interrogative; and it is only a part of what he does. His ...”

“... since Grigson is a Little Englander, ‘the mob of Lowlanders who write in Lallans’ (for Hugh Macdiarmid, as for many others, he has a ferocious aversion that is never explained), and ‘the mob of Welshmen who write in Welsh ...’ At any rate, and oddly enough, France – specifically the France of Ronsard, from whom he translates four ...”

“... yet also busy sites of literary production were at this date connected facts. In the Shetlands, Hugh MacDiarmid – praised by MacNeice in reviews – had published his Second Hymn to Lenin and would soon write his own prose book on the Scottish islands. In the Hebrides, Sorley MacLean had composed an elegy for MacNeice’s friend John ...”

“... he would fight because he was convinced Hitler would attack Russia, and because (as he wrote to MacDiarmid in 1941) his fear and hatred of the Nazis was greater than his hatred of ‘the English Empire’.* Eliot and MacLean may be seen as poles apart. What they shared was more important. Each was impelled by a duty to his language, by the necessity of ...”

“... Mick Imlah to edit a new Scottish anthology. Will he allow Sorley MacLean’s voice to accompany MacDiarmid’s? To the best of my knowledge, nobody has been asked to do a new Oxford anthology, though the youngest poet in their extant volume, Iain Crichton Smith, is now a sprightly 68. Watson’s model is not the Oxford or the Penguin, but ...”

“... writers of their day, and perhaps of their century, the novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon and the poet Hugh MacDiarmid. ‘Few things cry so urgently for rewriting as does Scots history,’ Grassic Gibbon writes,as in few aspects of her bastardised culture has Scotland been so ill-served as by her historians. The chatter and gossip of half the salons and ...”

“... name. Other people were also interested in the name: ‘T.S. Eliot – it’s a Scottish name,’ Hugh MacDiarmid writes in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, and Eliot grew tolerantly fed up with Scots who told him this. The day after April Fools’ Day in 1936 he had ‘to interview’ (the term he used for professional encounters) ‘an elderly ...”

“... unfair – was A Sinking Island (1987) by another chip-shouldering excolonial, the Canadian Hugh Kenner. Crawford doesn’t like Kenner’s book: naturally not, since Kenner, convicting the whole insula of insularity, conspicuously doesn’t exonerate any Scots from the indictment (though – unkindest cut – he does exonerate one Welshman, David ...”

“... 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 ...”