Awa' An' Bile Yer Heid! (eBook)

Authors, critics and publishers

It is really very generous of Mr Thomson to consent to live at all.

Anonymous contemporary critic of James Thomson (1834–1882),
poet of voluptuous death, quoted in notes to Douglas Young,
Scottish Verse 1851–1951

Why bother yourself about the cataract of drivel for which Conan Doyle was responsible?

JOSEPH BELL (1837–1911), said to have been
Conan Doyle’s model for Sherlock Holmes, in a letter

The archetypal Scottish sexist.

ALAN BOLD (1943–98), The Sensual Scot, on Robert Burns

One good critic could demolish all this dreck, but one good critic is precisely what we do not have. Instead we are lumbered with pin-money pundits, walled-up academics or old ladies of both sexes.

EDDIE BOYD (1916–1989), on Scottish
drama and drama critics, in Cencrastus (Autumn 1987)

‘It adds a new terror to death.’

LORD BROUGHAM (1778–1868), Lord Chancellor of Great Britain,
on Lord Campbell’s Lives of the Lord Chancellors (1845–47)

ROBERT BURNS (1759–1796), on James Elphinston’s (1721–1809)
translation of Martial’s Epigrams

LORD BYRON (1788–1824), English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,
on Sir Walter Scott

My northern friends have accused me, with justice, of personality towards their great literary anthropophagus, Jeffrey; but what else was to be done with him and his dirty pack, who feed by ‘lying and slandering’ and slake their thirst with ‘evil speaking?’

LORD BYRON, postscript to the second edition of English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers, on Francis Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Review

Napoleon is a tyrant, a monster, the sworn foe of our nation. But gentlemen – he once shot a publisher.

THOMAS CAMPBELL (1777–1844), proposing a toast to
Napoleon Bonaparte at a writers’ dinner

Fricassee of dead dog . . . A truly unwise little book. The kind of man that Keats was gets ever more horrible to me. Force of hunger for pleasure of every kind, and want of all other force – such a soul, it would once have been very evident, was a chosen ‘vessel of Hell’.

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795–1881), on Monckton Milnes’s Life of Keats

A weak, diffusive, weltering, ineffectual man . . . Never did I see such apparatus got ready for thinking, and so little thought. He mounts scaffolding, pulleys and tackle, gathers all the tools in the neighbourhood with labour, with noise, demonstration, precept, abuse, and sets – three bricks.

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795–1881), on Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering Tomfool I do not know. Poor Lamb! Poor England! when such a despicable abortion is given the name of genius.

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795–1881), on Charles Lamb

Shelley is a poor creature, who has said or done nothing worth a serious man being at the trouble of remembering.

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795–1881), on Percy Bysshe Shelley

At bottom, this Macaulay is but a poor creature with his dictionary literature and erudition, his saloon arrogance. He has no vision in him. He will neither see nor do any great thing.

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795–1881), on Lord Macaulay

. . . standing in a cess-pool, and adding to it

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795–1881), quoted in Jean Overton Fuller,
Swinburne (1968), on Algernon Charles Swinburne

All his life he loved attempting magnificent things in a slapdash way and, whatever others might think, he was seldom dissatisfied with the result.

DONALD CARSWELL (1882–1940) on J.S. Blackie,
in Brother Scots (1927)

Joanna Baillie is now almost totally forgotten, even among feminist academics dredging the catalogues for third-rate women novelists . . . Her life story is a quaint one, interesting for being so dull.

RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN, Romantic Affinities (1988),
on the C19th tragedian Joanna Baillie

SAMUEL COLVILLE or COLVIN, Pindarique Ode on Bishop Burnet’s
‘Dialogues’, c. 1689; Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715) became
Bishop of Salisbury under William of Orange and was
detested by both Presbyterians and Jacobites

The man’s mind was not clean . . . he degraded and prostituted his intellect, and earned thereby the love and worship of a people whose distinguishing trait is fundamental lewdness . . . Put into decent English many of his most vaunted lays amount to nothing at all . . . His life as a whole would have discredited a dustman, much less a poet . . . a superincontinent yokel with a gift for metricism.

T.W.H. CROSLAND, The Unspeakable Scot (1902),
on Robert Burns (and his fellow countrymen)

. . . deplorable is the mildest epithet one can justly apply to it. Wordsworth writes somewhere of a person ‘who would peep and botanise about his mother’s grave’. This is exactly the feeling that a reading of Margaret Ogilvy gives you.

T.W.H. CROSLAND, The Unspeakable Scot,
on Sir J.M. Barrie’s memoir of his mother

It is with publishers as with wives: one always wants someone else’s.

NORMAN DOUGLAS (1868–1952)

Mr Coleridge was in bad health; – the particular reason is not given; but the careful reader will form his own conclusions . . . Upon the whole, we look upon this publication as one of the most notable pieces of impertinence of which the press has lately been guilty.

The Edinburgh Review, anonymous review of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (1816)

THOMAS, LORD ERSKINE (1750–1823),
on Sir Walter Scott’s ‘The Field of Waterloo’

It is a story of crofter life near Stonehaven; but it is questionable if the author, or authoress, is correct in the description of crofter girls’ underclothing of that period.

Fife Herald book review of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s
Cloud Howe, quoted in L. Grassic Gibbon and
Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish Scene (1934)

The bleatings of a sheep.

JOHN FRASER, Professor of Celtic at Oxford University,
on the translations from Gaelic of Kenneth Macleod (1871–1955),
quoted in The Memoirs of Lord Bannerman of Kildonan

Mr Gunn is a brilliant novelist from Scotshire who chooses his home county as the scene of his tales . . . he is the greatest loss to itself that Scottish literature has suffered in this century.

LEWIS GRASSIC GIBBON (James Leslie Mitchell, 1901–35),
Scottish Scene

Welsh’s market remains captive: the inarticulate 20-somethings, call-centre folk, cyberserfs, unsmug unmarrieds who infest [city centre] fun palaces. Welsh is to this lot what, in his happier days, Jeffrey Archer was to Mondeo Man: the jammy bastard who did well.

CHRISTOPHER HARVIE (1944– ) quoted by Senay Boztas,
Sunday Herald, 23 January 2005, on Irvine Welsh

wee Maurice (most minuscule of makars)

HAMISH HENDERSON (1920–2002), letter to Hugh MacDiarmid,
3 April 1949, on Maurice Lindsay

The final word on Burns must always be that he is the least rewarding of his country’s major exports, neither so nourishing as porridge, or stimulating as whisky, nor so relaxing as golf.

KENNETH HOPKINS, English Poetry, quoted in
Hugh MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet (1943)

If you imagine a Scotch commercial traveller in a Scotch commercial hotel leaning on the bar and calling the barmaid Dearie, then you will know the keynote of Burns’s verse.

A.E. HOUSMAN (1859–1936), quoted in Jonathon Green,
Dictionary of Insulting Quotations (1996)

Dr Donne’s verses are like the Peace of God, for they pass all understanding.

KING JAMES VI (1566–1625), attributed,
on the poems of John Donne

This will never do!

LORD JEFFREY (1773–1850), reviewing Wordsworth’s
‘The Excursion’ in The Edinburgh Review, November 1814

Writers are too difficult.

A member of the Glasgow Festivals Unit team, on why so few
writers were involved in the city’s ‘Culture Year’ (1990),
quoted in James Kelman, Some Recent Attacks (1992)

Yuh wrote? A po-it? Micht ye no’ juist as weel hae peed inti thuh wund?

MAURICE LINDSAY (1918– ) recalling the comment of an
anonymous Glaswegian ‘In a Glasgow Loo’,
from Robin Bell, The Best of Scottish Poetry (1989)