In March 1927, Arthur Conan Doyle put together a list of his own top 12 Sherlock Holmes stories, sealed it in an envelope, & left it with the editor of the Strand magazine…
Broad in the beam? More broad in sympathy.
Stiff in the joints? More flexible in mind.
Deaf on the right? New voices from the Left
In politics and art more clearly sound…
I never felt so much
Since I have felt at all
The tingling smell and touch
Of dogrose and sweet briar,
Nettles against the wall,
All sours and sweets that grow
Together or apart
In hedge or marsh or ditch…
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck…
“Edwin Muir (1887–1959) is a mysteriously neglected, gorgeous, and emotionally penetrating poet. Of all the many pieces of writing spurred by the Cold War and the threat of nuclear apocalypse, and of the other kinds of 20th century apocalyptic writing, his poem ‘The Horses’ may be the most effective, perhaps because it is the most calm and gentle.”
—Robert Pinsky
Old gods and goddesses who have lived so long
Through time and never found eternity,
Fettered by wasting wood and hollowing hill,
You should have fled our ever-dying song…
One foot in Eden still, I stand
And look across the other land.
The world’s great day is growing late,
Yet strange these fields that we have planted
So long with crops of love and hate…
“Muir’s contact with Europe is significant, however, not only in a personal and literary sense, but also in a wider political context which resonates with our own early twenty-first century times. His travels in the 1920s immediately after the end of World War One, and again at the end of World War Two, tell a story of Europe itself at critical points in its history.”
Alistair MacLean (1922–1987) – author of The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra, Where Eagles Dare, & many others – was born #OTD, 21 April, 1922. A native #Gaelic speaker, he grew up near Inverness. @NeilDrysdale tells the story of MacLean’s remarkable life
Hugh MacDiarmid at 100
Studies in Scottish Literature 49/1, 2024
Open Access
This special issue celebrates & interrogates the first appearance in print of ‘Hugh M‘Diarmid’, in 1922, & examines the long-lasting influence within Scottish literary studies of the Scottish Renaissance group Christopher Murray Grieve initiated & of the reshaping he proposed in how Scottish literary history should be viewed.