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“... Norman Maclean was born in western Montana in 1902. There landscapes are elemental: earth, air, water and sometimes fire are distinct and imposing presences. It’s mainly open country, with high mountains but also wide valleys, and the sky seems as immense as it does in deserts, although the valleys of western Montana are not desert but upland plain ...”

“... and with sudden delight, that we find those poets who later become vital to us. I knew Sorley MacLean by reputation before I felt his authority. His renovation of a poetic tradition, his cross-fertilisation of love and politics, of metaphysical technique and traditional Gaelic modes, of dan direach and personal destiny – I knew about all this at ...”

“... an air of premature senescence hangs over The Year’s Afternoon. ‘Three Poets’ elegises Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean and George Mackay Brown, 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 ...”

“... love cities the way Frank O’Hara loved New York. Crawford, like his nearest literary forebear Norman MacCaig, loves places both rural and urban: in his work, he can throw his voice ‘deep down the larynx of Glen Esk’, and he can marry Iona, or bring the reader into close contact with his ‘Inner Glasgow’, a place of abolished pit bings and empty ...”

“... O’Brien is more Anglocentric: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is in facing-page English, but Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith, for example, occur only in English, and there is no Welsh-language poetry at all. On the other hand, O’Brien’s selection of English-language poetry casts a wider and more ambitious net. ‘Even as we study it, the map changes ...”

“... marginalised: James Connolly, Irish socialist executed for his part in the Easter Rebellion, John Maclean, idiosyncratic Scottish revolutionary socialist, and John Wheatley, an ILP’er from Glasgow and Minister of Health in the first Labour government. Like Foster and Woolfson, Howell is concerned with historical potentiality never realised, and is anxious ...”

“... effect of the bulk (not all) of English verse. ‘It almost seems,’ he says, ‘that since the Norman conquest, the temperature of the English language has been subtly raised by a warm front coming up from the Mediterranean.’ Thus for him, and for most of the other contributors, the infusion of Romance civility into the English language has ...”

“... of Grieve’s early life, so that we see, not only Grieve the friend of Red Clydesiders John MacLean and James Maxton, but also the Grieve whose Scottish nationalism was encouraged by his rejection by English girls. Heady on his home-brew of Nietzsche, John Davidson, and almost any other literary material he could devour, this proto-MacDiarmid emerges as ...”

“... like the celebrated cigarette lighter, they lit ‘first time, every time’. In Fury, Private Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a recruit as green as they come, joins a battle-hardened crew under the leadership of Sergeant Don ‘Wardaddy’ Collier (Brad Pitt). It’s April 1945, and they’re about to drive like hell into the heart of Germany. For the next ...”

“... Penguin have commissioned Mick Imlah to edit a new Scottish anthology. Will he allow Sorley MacLean’s voice to accompany MacDiarmid’s? To the best of my knowledge, nobody has been asked to do a new Oxford anthology, though the youngest poet in their extant volume, Iain Crichton Smith, is now a sprightly 68. Watson’s model is not the Oxford or the ...”

“... attitudes to the intelligence services are governed by two separate obsessions. The discovery of Maclean, Burgess, Philby and Blunt as Soviet agents has produced a long-lasting preoccupation with hunting down moles, ‘agents of influence’ and the like. Newspapers love it, the public are interested, and the whole business is endlessly stoked by the more ...”

“... information here (lest the Russians get to know of it?), but the British told the Americans and Norman Moss found full details in their FBI files. Klaus Fuchs was born in 1911, the son of a German pastor with left-wing sympathies who taught his children the Lutheran precept of acting according to their own consciences rather than obeying established ...”

“... consider his verdict on a disagreement between two Gaelic poets of our time, Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith, about a Gaelic poet of long ago, Rob Dunn (d. 1778). Judging from the poems in the anthology translated by themselves, I will trust MacLean’s opinion over Smith’s. But that isn’t the ...”

“... research and referencing, to argue that a version of primitive communism had existed before the Norman invasion of the 12th century. He also made use of the ideas of European and North American anthropologists and historians such as Charles Letourneau, Lewis Henry Morgan and Henry Maine, who suggested that common ownership of land had been the basis of ...”

“... of outlook. Then there have been three books concerned with another Canadian of our time, Herbert Norman, a Cambridge Communist who turned into a respected member of his country’s diplomatic service, was hunted by the Cold War pack, and ended, a suicide, at Cairo. He has become something of a symbol of Canadian independence from America, but scholars from ...”