Monthly Archives: January 2020

Remembering Alasdair Gray

Artistic blooms tend to be triggered by seismic technological or political change. Where the first Scottish literary “renaissance” arrived as the result of the brutal shock to romantic sentiments the First World War had dealt, a new flurry of writing … Continue reading

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2019 in retrospect

In January work began in earnest on my German dissertation. I was comparing the 1950s poetry of two of East Germany’s leading literary figures: Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller. The latter had been charged with unoriginality in contemporary criticism of … Continue reading

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