Edwin Muir

The predicament of the Scottish writer

Scott and Scotland

Gavin

Exciting, novel and almost totally wrong, in a fertile and important way. Muir diagnoses four hundred years of post-Reformation Scottish art as weak, makes giant claims about national psychology, and traces out a Scottish Renaissance at odds with the nationalists, MacDiarmid in particular (Muir thinks it’s not the Union’s fault but Knox’s.) A sort of radical conservatism. 

Pairing Muir with Allan Massie’s careful hatchet-introduction strikes me as a public service.

Scott and Scotland The predicament of the Scottish writer

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