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“... Lewis GrassicGibbon (the pen-name of James Leslie Mitchell) is put forward as his country’s great 20th-century novelist: the Scottish D.H. Lawrence. Gibbon’s reputation substantially rests on A Scots Quair (‘quire’ – or ‘gathering of sheets’), also called ‘The Mearns Trilogy’, Mearns being an ancient name for Kincardineshire, now itself an ancient name after the county reorganisation of 1975 ...”

“... The family, stuff of novelists as different as Rose Macaulay and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Lewis GrassicGibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S. Eliot’s parents, a religious poet and a businessman, produced between them a businessman-religious poet, and meant an enormous amount to him ...”

“... from time to time; John Muir of My First Summer in the Sierra, a farmer’s son and farmer; and Lewis GrassicGibbon of A Scots Quair, a farmer’s son from the Mearns in north-east Scotland. All three produced work that strikes me as special – as important, if you like – because they saw the countryside and its ...”

“... stories, reminded me stylistically of some of the Scottish writers I admired, like James Kelman, Lewis GrassicGibbon and Janice Galloway. In the best of his work, the narrative is fragmented; there are sudden ellipses and omissions. He shifts aim slightly, deliberately missing the obvious dramatic bullseye: in ...”

“... robust, grimly convincing alternatives to Stevenson’s historical tales. What do Hay, Brown and Lewis GrassicGibbon owe to Stevenson? Very little, perhaps, unless ‘Thrawn Janet’ or the melodramatic boldness of Jekyll and Hyde left their mark. Edwin Morgan has chosen well from the earlier satirical poetry of ...”

“... of good material to exploit, as has been only too well recognised by those who, from Barrie to Lewis GrassicGibbon, have been – to great and lingering effect – essentially exploitative. And not only in literary terms, since it’s the working-class they’ve always used to demonstrate what it means to be ...”

“... intrusion by an 18th-century lyric into the UK top ten. ‘Lochaber no more/Sutherland no more/Lewis no more/Skye no more’, sang the Proclaimers, reprising the sentiment a few lines later as ‘Bathgate no more/Linwood no more/Methil no more/Irvine no more’. These were towns where big car plants and steel fabrication factories had recently shut down ...”

“... Orchardson, RLS and the later Haldanes did not spring from nowhere. Still less, so to speak, did Lewis GrassicGibbon. Such large mainly home-based figures as Rennie Mackintosh, MacDiarmid, Joan Eardley, still inspirational today, are not admitted into Smout’s pages to tease us or to cheer us up. More ...”

“... took us through the work of Berthold Brecht, while the nationalist head of English pitched us into Lewis GrassicGibbon, and it didn’t seem as though they were pulling in opposite directions (as James Leslie Mitchell, his real name, Gibbon was, after all, a socialist ...”