After the First World War, Hugh MacDiarmid took hold of the pillars of the Scottish literary and educational establishment and did the job of Samson. The essays that form "Contemporary Scottish Studies", first published in "The Scottish Educational J...

Born on 24 July 1895, Robert Graves had a richly literary early environment. His father was a poet and a schools inspector. He followed, with firmer tread, in his father's footsteps. Admired in his pram by Swinburne, he was not permanently damaged by...

Since its publication in 1990, "Critical Terms for Literary Study" has become a landmark introduction to the work of literary theory – giving tens of thousands of students an unparalleled encounter with what it means to do theory and criticism. Signi...

This volume concludes the corrected text of the almost 1500 pages of "Hugh MacDiarmid's Complete Poems", with a volume including the full texts of "In Memoriam James Joyce" (1955), "Three Hymns to Lenin" (1957), "The Kind of Poetry I Want" (1961) and...

Artur Corvelo inherits a legacy, quits his provincial home town and sets out for the capital. Armed with some poems and a heroic play, he seeks literary renown and entry into fashionable intellectual and social circles. Disillusion follows and he ret...

This rich and varied collection, his first in ten years, gathers Harry Guest's poems from 1983 to 1990. Intelligence, compassion, formal inventiveness and a gift for evocation both of landscape and things remembered blend to give his poetry its attra...

Four hundred and fifty years ago, on 23 September 1543, three Portuguese merchants travelling on a Chinese junk were blown by a storm onto the south-western tip of Japan. So at last was discovered to the West that fabled country which Marco Polo repo...

John Clare (1793-1864): Born the son of a thresher at Helpston, Northamptonshire, John Clare is a rural poet and story teller. He is a poet of spiritual originality, as compelling at his best as Crabbe and Wordsworth as a story teller in verse. He wa...

Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, an "heroic comedy" of love and honour, has enjoyed various revivals in the cinema and on the stage, and undergoes yet another metamorphosis in this brilliant translation by Edwin Morgan. Made for the Communicado T...

Returning from Brazil, Bazilio tells his cousin Louisa of the brave new world. His revelation leads to a devastating conclusion. "O Primo Bazilio has a far deeper tragedy than Madame Bovary", wrote Roy Campbell, "because the girl involved is not a bi...