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“... more precise theory and practice of language than the on-going bustle of narrative will allow for. George Meredith, to take a good example, plays havoc with the expected sequence of events, expanding and contracting particular elements of the plot so that we can feel the sinews of narrative creaking and cracking under the strain. Then he turns round and ...”

“... place acquire an undeflectable fascination. This is as true of Cavafy in Alexandria as it is of George MackayBrown in Orkney. Born in the Orcadian harbour town of Stromness in 1921, Brown was the youngest of six children. His father was a local postman, his mother an incomer from ...”

“... into the Gaedhaltacht areas of Donegal, out of apprehension about its Anglicising effect. George MackayBrown’s Orkney is an unfamiliar, off-shore locality in which everything seems a little richer through being both concentrated and chancy. How long can its distinctive character survive? It was endangered as ...”

“... eager for literary mentorship, was beginning a PhD at St Andrews on the laconic Orcadian writer George MackayBrown. Things did not look promising. His PhD supervisor was Alexander Falconer, a wartime naval officer whose ‘masterwork’ was Shakespeare and the Sea (1964), which he had followed up with A Glossary of ...”

“... to consider the struggle of the individual in the face of supernatural forces, to address what George MackayBrown calls ‘the riddle of fate and freedom’, then you are best-off retreating into the distant past, as he has done in his fifth novel, Vinland. Here Brown has ...”

“... in the pantheons of our archipelago. This produces tacit conspiracies of specialisation. Thus George MackayBrown specialises in Feyness, Fiona Pitt-Kethley in Coarseness. Mackay Brown’s The Wreck of the Archangel may charm – Said stone to buttercup, ‘Dance till ...”

“... recently dead friends and poets (Ted Hughes, Zbigniew Herbert, Joseph Brodsky, Norman MacCaig and George MackayBrown) tend to be wide-ranging meditations on literature and language.In his criticism as well as his poetry, Heaney has always excelled at finding metaphors of process for the act of ...”

“... he expanded and elucidated Virgil, his translation left nothing out. Royle is right to mention Sir George MacKenzie of Rosehaugh as ‘one of the few intellectual giants of his day’ – ‘that noble wit of Scotland’, as Dryden called him – but he might have told us that his Aretina (1660) was the first novel by a Scotsman (and he mght have mentioned Sir ...”

“... to compare with Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in an Convex Mirror’ and ‘Fantasia on “The Nut-Brown Maid” ’. The origin of ‘A Wave’ may be the passage about dreams in ‘Self-Portrait’: ‘They seemed strange because we couldn’t actually see them ... ’ As in ‘Self-Portrait’, Ashbery’s style is loose-limbed, musing, discursive unrhymed ...”

“... hangs over The Year’s Afternoon. ‘Three Poets’ elegises Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean and George MackayBrown, a list to which he has added Iain Crichton Smith in the dedication of One Hundred 20th-Century Scottish Poems (2000), a sampler from his earlier Faber anthology. Again the cheering conclusion: ‘Let ...”

“... wind-honed archipelago. Many of them are inhabited. The islands are whale-shapes, as their poet George MackayBrown noted. Few trees impede the wind. Water, salt and fresh, in wide bays or lochs or channels, is always to hand, lightening and softening the land it encircles. The land is fertile, the people ...”

“... periodical, the New Age, and to meet Scottish intellectuals including the composer Francis George Scott (to whom Hugh MacDiarmid would dedicate A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle) and a French lecturer at Glasgow University called Denis Saurat (who is often credited with giving the 1920s Scottish literary renaissance its name). Most important, ‘in the ...”

“... experience fighting against the kinds of common experience labelled ‘heritage’. There are brown signs directing you off the road to crucial destinations, but in Cumberland, for instance, the land itself is the naked truth, the thing that the heritage industry can’t quite bottle and label. There’s just this immensity, with the clouds scudding over ...”

“... for reconstructing Europe after the Second World War, named after the US secretary of state, George C. Marshall. Between April 1948, when President Truman signed it into law, and the end of 1951, the European Recovery Programme (ERP) poured more than $13 billion of aid into Western Europe – roughly equivalent to $550 billion as a share of current US ...”

“... none the less patronisingly dismissed Jane Austen as ‘knowing no more of her process than the brown bird that sings on the orchard bough’, he forgot or ignored the fact that a highly skilled and instinctive artist may know very little about how his task came to be chosen, but a very great deal about how it was done. The process and impulse in these ...”