Robert Crawford · Peerie Breeks: Willa and Edwin Muir · LRB 21 September 2023 lrb.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lrb.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Alan Riach takes a look beyond the titles of two of Hugh MacDiarmid’s most controversial essays. IT was disappointing to read Fintan O’Toole describing the origins of the Scottish National Party like this: “The SNP itself was a strange beast. Its roots lay in a semi-fascist 1930s racialised nationalism.” (‘Nicola Sturgeon’s staunch ally in her push for independence – Boris Johnson’, Irish Times, January 16, 2021). And it was characteristically encouraging to read Joanna Cherry promptly correcting him gently but firmly in the same newspaper. O’Toole’s words, she said, were “not accurate”: “The founders of the SNP were a diverse group who included writers and intellectuals from the left, as well as those who were keen to preserve our country’s culture and traditions in much the same way as those who founded the Irish Republic.” (‘The SNP and Scottish nationalism’, Irish Times, January 19, 2021).