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“... to a passionate radicalism in politics, a radicalism which, like that of his friend and admirer Hugh MacDiarmid, refused to be bound by the platform of any political party. He was elected as a Liberal MP for North-West Lanark in 1886 and sat in Parliament until 1892. He was more of a socialist than a Liberal, however, influenced by H.M. Hyndman and ...”

“... enough to make the end of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ appear like a moment’s inclemency. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid had a feeling for the freezing lives of sheep, and he resurrected, or to some extent invented, the words that would capture the rude nature of the Scottish snowstorm, calling it the ‘yowdendrift’, when snow is blown across the fields at ...”

“... boxing, bowling, golf, football, fishing – that bear comparison with the journalism of his uncle Hugh McIlvanney. McIlvanney’s Lyons – ‘in a parliament of cloggers, he was Georgie Best’ – is an accomplished orator, ruthless operator and formidable presence. The novel is purportedly set during the second term of a devolved administration, yet it is ...”

“... running out of puff on Finchley Road). I saw the comedy. The humour of these rocks is savage. Hugh MacDiarmid, in his poems ‘On a Raised Beach’ and ‘Crystals like Blood’, showed the way discriminations of stone define place, define the mental landscape of elective exile. The conceit of MacDiarmid’s poems ...”

“... and Isherwood fleeing the war will never be resolved: for the politically-minded, the view of Hugh MacDiarmid that you can’t strike a match on a crumbling wall, and that none of these people mattered much anyway, is hard to answer. This book, with its twists of karma, brings back the European ghosts: That same evening, I went with Berthold to ...”

“... not for want of trying. Now in his eighties, Morgan is the most influential Scottish poet since Hugh MacDiarmid. Partly because his prose statements and his poetic praxis lay more stress on what poetry can be than on what it should be, that influence has occasioned remarkably little anxiety in the younger poets, such as Robert Crawford, Liz ...”

“... up in a Scottish literary climate still linguistically fissured in the wake of the quarrel between Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir; he was also painfully aware of the difficulties of writing for a Scottish Gaelic audience numbering at best 65,000, most of whom would have little interest in experimental contemporary poetry or prose. The title of one of his ...”

“... was always falling from the Edenic Orkney of his childhood.) Crawford brings us word of Hugh MacDiarmid, who felt that Scotland’s capital was ‘too stupid yet/To learn how not to stand in her own light’. These were writers in revolt against the complacencies of familiar places, the received wisdom of belonging. Maybe Crawford is just a ...”

“... years. Success eluded him during his lifetime, although some prescient fellow writers, notably Hugh MacDiarmid and H.G. Wells, had marked him as a major talent. Say ‘Scotland’ and few people (and no travel agents) will think of the bleak, windswept, comparatively featureless North-Eastern coastal region that separates St Andrews from Aberdeen. The ...”

“... to – the poet it is supposed to be commemorating. If the poem was called, say, ‘In Memoriam Hugh MacDiarmid’ it would make no discernible difference. And this shows, if nothing else, how completely poetry and natural form are linked in Robertson’s ...”

“... of the British writers who have received the most international recognition: Bunting, David Jones, Hugh MacDiarmid and W.S. Graham are just a few of them. The work of these poets, and their successors in Other, is not inaccessible; it is ‘differently immediate’. Both the Prynne Poems and the anthology are easy enough to find in the shops, so there’s ...”

“... 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 early winter of ...”

“... and its apparent connection to the political right, unionism is also perceived to be inauthentic. Hugh MacDiarmid, who listed his hobby in Who’s Who as Anglophobia, rejected the ‘touts and toadies and lickspittles of the English Ascendancy’ in Scotland as collaborators with an alien oppressor. To uphold the Union was to be false to Scotland. ...”

“... the 19th century, sanitising and sugaring the Bard out of recognition. In the 20th century, led by Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish intellectuals hit back, denouncing the Burns cult for its smugness, sexism and wholesale distortion: It has denied his spirit to honour his name. It has denied his poetry to laud his amours. It has preserved his furniture and ...”

“... which pub, and young Karl was introduced to the mighty poets of Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch, among others. MacIver played some of the part of a father, taking Karl all over town to whatever was happening on stage or on screen. MacCaig was to become a lifelong friend, guide and admirer; they shared ...”