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“... Before 1922 Hugh MacDiarmid did not exist. And only Christopher Murray Grieve would have dared to invent him. Alan Bold’s valuable biography points out that when the 30-year-old Grieve began to write in the Scottish Chapbook under the pseudonym ‘M’Diarmid’, he was already editing the magazine under his own name, reviewing for it as ‘Martin Gillespie’, and employing himself as its Advertising Manager (and occasional contributor), ‘A ...”

“... Was Hugh MacDiarmid a great poet? Was he, as John MacQueen asserts in his Foreword to Catherine Kerrigan’s study, one of ‘the three greatest poets to use English in the 20th century’, the other two being Yeats and Eliot? One can understand MacQueen putting the matter that way, but perhaps it is not the most helpful way when the reputations of Eliot and Yeats are shaking down, in the ordinary process of time, following their immense acclaim ...”

“... too small for him. More than half a century later Grieve, now in his eighties and long famous as Hugh MacDiarmid, was still crowing about this. As an established man of letters, he could afford to be wry about the story, but the fact that he tells it at all makes clear his own big-headedness – the great pleasure he took in the enormousness and ...”

“... generation after Pound: David Jones, Anglo-Welshman; Basil Bunting, Northumbrian Englishman; and Hugh MacDiarmid, Lowland Scot. The claim for Jones seems the weakest: it is advanced by Jones’s admirers, not by the poet himself, who took no interest in the question, having other fish to fry; and unlike most modernists, Jones had no patience with ...”

“... That assault on the ‘English ethos’ comes from one of its most vehement and defiant opponents, Hugh MacDiarmid. In the preface to his last published collection, Direadh (1974), he praised Eagleton’s book, but added that he had unfortunately overlooked the one shining exception to his general thesis: ...”

“... technique and appreciation of modern writers in that language as well as in the Classical tongues. Hugh Blair, a Church of Scotland minister who from 1762 became Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University, was in effect the world’s first Professor of English Literature. He built his lectures on Smith’s work. Smith held that ‘we in ...”

“... I must begin with these stones as the world began. Hugh MacDiarmid From the car park, the duckboard angles up like a runway to the overcast distance – but soon you’re back on solid earth, or rather shingle which yields and crunches underfoot. Behind you, the canter of the downs has come to an abrupt and nervous halt – as if it knows its own limitations ...”

“... attached to the whole of the sky. A Good Address Hair fizzing, earlobes red with daftness, Hugh MacDiarmid in his council house Or maybe out back, in its garden shed A.k.a. The Scottish Poetry Book Club, Retunes near planets till they mutter Doric Sing-songily, but alien all the same, Nane for thee a thochtie sparin’, Earth, thou bonnie broukit ...”

“... had triggered a savage and self-inflicted defeat for the progressive side. One notable antagonist, Hugh MacDiarmid, puts in an appearance early on. MacDiarmid had been Finlay’s best man, but when Finlay published Glasgow Beasts, an’ a Burd in 1961 the pioneer of synthetic Scots was scandalised by its demotic ...”

“... and lack of refinement’, as well as ‘a self-abasing admiration for rigid order’. Like Hugh MacDiarmid, Paulin said, Hopkins had a ‘risky, over-the-top extremism’ to his imagination, and while in Ireland in 1887-8 gave vent in his verse to ‘revolutionary intoxication, an expressionist whap of pure energy’ inspired by his perception ...”

“... edition of Shakespeare, published in 1795, closes its preface by applying to Shakespeare some of Hugh Blair’s eulogistic words about Ossian. In England, Shakespeare was already being promoted as the national bard. One of the King’s Men, he was a good monarchist; his work was the perfection of the English language; his triumphs took place at the heart of ...”

“... reviewers and commentators, then and later, seem to have agreed with Spring’s assessment. Not Hugh MacDiarmid, however. In a poem which contrasts those who went to fight in 1914 with the International Brigaders, MacDiarmid writes: Despite the undeniable honesty, the little literary gift, What is Sherston’s ...”

“... 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 one another’s ears, yet homeward-bound at the end of it all to beat their ...”

“... its allure and its power, but it was also part of its problematic status. Macpherson was urged by Hugh Blair, one of the inventors of modern English Studies, to bring back more developed texts of his Gaelic epic, which he could then translate into English. Macpherson had claimed, after the Fragments were published, that there survived in the Highlands great ...”

“... I took it for granted that linguistic diversity was integral to a national culture: Burns and MacDiarmid in Scots and English, Sorley MacLean in Gaelic – and Edwin Morgan veering into Loch Ness Monsterese and Mercurian.In this spirit, I edited or co-edited four anthologies during my thirties. All contained work in English, Scots and Gaelic. The two ...”