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“... 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 ...”

“... if there is a vote for UK withdrawal from Europe, support for Scottish independence could surge. Robert Crawford The Scottish Referendum​ of 2014 is a watershed in the history of Britain. The Union of 1707 as we have known it is no more, even if some kind of union between England and Scotland continues. Scots have been ‘promised’ more powers for ...”

“... 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 closing page of The Bard that ...”

“... be reviewed in the LRB, is giving the first lecture, and he will be followed by, among others, Robert Crawford, Meg Bateman, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Billy Bragg and Sukhdev Sandhu. You might think the editorial staff of the Sun could learn a thing or two from attending some of the talks, until you have a look at Hold Ye Front Page, or its sequel, Hold ...”

“... they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their preface to the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, ‘is intended to be didactic as well as representative.’ Though the things anthologies make happen may be confined to ...”

“... the Tom and Viv bits which we are all likely to home in on.’ In 2022, with the second volume of Robert Crawford’s sensitive biography, it’s the Tom and Em bits.This is unfortunate: Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’ is a rich study of the period from 1922 until Eliot’s death in 1965 – years that contained much besides a complicated love ...”

“... at the ready, would have concurred. Sampson’s book was called English for the English. However, Robert Crawford’s new collection of essays makes it emphatically clear that our present political context calls for quite a different perspective: one, as his earlier Devolving English Literature implies, more firmly focused on a latter-day drama in which ...”

“... background, and although Herbert Howarth wrote well about it in Some Figures behind T.S. Eliot, Robert Crawford has made a substantial addition. His patient Oxford D.Phil. thesis is intended more generally to illustrate Eliot’s preoccupation with the primitive and the city, but its opening chapters are about St Louis and the Mississippi. He ...”

“... should be, that influence has occasioned remarkably little anxiety in the younger poets, such as Robert Crawford, Liz Lochead, W.N. Herbert, Kathleen Jamie and Jackie Kay, who have learned from him. In Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity, Colin Nicholson tries to account for his many-sided subject by examining him facet by facet, but the result is ...”

“... while still an undergraduate at Columbia, where Mark Van Doren was his teacher and mentor; and Robert Penn Warren was the editor (at Southern Review) whom he first sought to impress. But if the New Critical aesthetic disciplined Berryman it also inhibited him. It gave him a good technical training, but its insistence on what he later called ‘Eliot’s ...”

“... as inescapable in Burns’s life as in his poetry, McIntyre comes across something of a Malvolio. Robert Heron in 1797 was the first to reveal that Burns’s behaviour deteriorated on his visit to Edinburgh, thanks to his introduction to the Crochallan Fencibles, a club for serious, professional-class drinkers. McIntyre’s distaste is quite as decided as ...”

“... rain as ‘grief in arrears’ is the loveliest thing in the book), or the compact subtleties of Robert Crawford, whose short poem ‘Scotland’ is infinitely more subtle and political than the work of Didsbury and McMillan or even Peter Reading. And then the sweet, rapid brocade of Glyn Maxwell’s complex forms, or the grace of Pauline Stainer. These ...”

“... tradition alike (with more than a hundred pages of endnotes citing work by the likes of Tom Nairn, Robert Crawford and Brian Doyle), this is an examination of the writing produced across these islands during the crucial century between the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in 1603 and the passage of the legislation that at last ...”

“... helped by the untimely publication of his ditto. Graham Greenes (d. 1991) are on the way down, Robert Lowells (d. 1977, with the Collected Poems coming next year) are a good buy; stock in Anthony Burgess (d. 1993) should probably be held for a year or two; Borgeses (d. 1986) will surge once the editing and republishing are sorted out; James Merrills ...”

“... could have changed his sensibility, but, despite contact and correspondence with the likes of Robert Lowell, he remained a visitor, too busy to look beyond the clichés. Writing to David Hammond from Salt Lake City airport in 1987, he notes the snowcapped Rockies and the big open sky of the West but says that this ‘domain of magnificent romance’ has ...”