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“... male) I think therefore I am I (male) think therefore I am I think (male) therefore I am I think therefore (male) I am I think therefore I (male) am I think therefore I am (male ...”

“... yi surta keep trynti avoid it thats thi difficult bitty it jist no keep findn yirsell sitn wotchn thi telly ur lookn oot thi windy that wey yi say christ a could go a roll n egg ur whuts thi time fuck me wiv nay cookn oil nwi need potatoes ...”

“... I know what it is to be powerless I know what it is to be made to lie low while the unknown enemy invades you what it is not to have words for what is happening for grass and tree and inanimate thing to be your only witness on the clearest day of a childhood almost fifty years ago; how I hate male fucking violence. this day I will wear nor white no ...”

“... a cop came to see me but I didn’t know he was a cop I’m so trusting!! and I said sit down and have a cup of tea and he sat down and had a cup of tea and he was a young man a nice looking young man he reminded me of my son the taller of my sons very discreet a good listener and I said would you like a banana? I eat bananas like a gorilla but the ...”

“... among publishers seems to have demanded the exclusion of Gaelic verse. John MacQueen and Tom Scott, who edited the 1966 Oxford anthology, were aware of the lack of Gaelic and squirm a bit in their Introduction. When Penguin had Tom Scott edit their Scottish anthology (published in 1970) again there was no ...”

“... new Glasgow writing’, a movement taken to involve man of pairts Alasdair Gray and poet Tom Leonard as well as Kelman and Galloway, to open on a sort of pen-Polaroid of the city of Glasgow itself. But nothing could be more inappropriate to the spirit of the writing. Turn to the stories collected in The Burn and in Blood: a powerful sense of ...”

“... to imagine anyone settling down to write the further adventures of that Harry Potter of the 1830s, Tom Brown; even harder to imagine anyone settling down to read them. (Thomas Hughes did in fact write a sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, but it’s never done as well as Tom Brown’s ...”

“... publishers such as Polygon and Canongate, writers like Alasdair Gray, Agnes Owens, Thomas Healy, Tom Leonard, James Kelman and Janice Galloway have found the city a congenial location for their life and work, and their success is encouraging others. Of course, Glasgow has always had its writers. Torrington’s late Sixties hero is himself a ...”

“... by other writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy leasehold, poetry’), in others a rule-book to be torn up (Agard’s ‘mugging de Queen’s English’), in others again a ...”

“... may be charged with filling the ear more than the mind.’ Without comparing the two Thomsons, Leonard shows by quotation that the Victorian (1834-82) is the greater poet. He shows, too, that the later Thomson’s life reflects the state of Britain more fully than other poets of his age excepting G. M. Hopkins and Hardy. Before describing how Places of the ...”

“... savage in Conrad’s steamship.’ He could have added that American literature is too, from Uncle Tom to Nigger Jim to Porgy and Bess and Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. The Americans, under the guidance first of the great W.E.B DuBois, then of the poets Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, and next a line of novelists headed by Richard Wright, began the ...”

“... it was that the better writers – whom we may as well call James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard among others – wouldn’t join in on the song. ‘It’s their loss,’ she said. ‘I mean, what do they want?’ A fairly good idea of what they wanted could be gleaned at that time from a visit to the Scotia Bar in Stockwell Street, where ...”

“... about the vanished woods of Raasay. But I quite take the point that to a demotic Glaswegian like Tom Leonard (b. 1944), that scene is as foreign as to any of us English suburbanites. In which case the question re-arises: what identity does Scottish poetry have, except as that which is not-English? Douglas Dunn tries to address this question, but his ...”

“... away rizla never/leave me’ sort. But there are some good (if hardly new) voices. Roy Fisher and Tom Leonard are both important poets of home-ground and its difficulties. Exotics, the arty and the posh always sound so much better than the homely, with the result, too often, as Leonard’s six o’clock newsreader puts ...”

“... had a brief stint as professor of creative writing at Glasgow University, a position shared with Tom Leonard and James Kelman; and nice gigs as a celebrity designer of murals at Hillhead subway station and at the Oran Mór arts centre. In terms of politics, however, Gray and the new Glasgow are at loggerheads. In 1990 he lampooned the European City of ...”