Allan Massie
A Man For A’ That
The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography
By Robert Crawford
Jonathan Cape 480pp £20 order from our bookshop
‘The Bard’ is Robert Burns, and this book will be published in January, on the 250th anniversary of his birth. The word ‘bard’ is now rarely used without a touch of irony, but in the eighteenth century it had a more positive and agreeable flavour. A polite society looked back with nostalgia to a more heroic age. Thomas Gray’s poem entitled ‘The Bard’ aims at the sublime. Macpherson’s only partly fraudulent Ossian poems popularised the idea of the bard as the expression of national spirit. When Burns called himself a bard, he did so self-consciously, as an indication that he aspired to speak for all Scotland. On the other hand, as Robert Crawford points out, there is a Scots word ‘bardie’ that means bold, impudent of speech, forward, quarrelsome. Burns was ‘bardie’ as well as ‘bard’.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'When the language starts functioning as a character in fiction, when it is there drawing attention to itself ... It’s not anything that anybody really takes seriously.'
Our interview with Anthony Burgess from 1983.
http://ow.ly/5u0y50yrjoO
'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire