Tonight is Burns Night, the annual celebration of Robert Burns, Scotland's favorite son, who was born on this day in 1757. Also known as the Ploughman Poet, the Bard of Ayrshire and in Scotland as simply The Bard, Burns) is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and his birthday is celebrated worldwide.
Just released in paperback, Rosemary Goring's Scotland: The Autobiography is a vivid, wide-ranging, and engrossing account of Scotland s history, composed of timeless stories by those who experienced it first-hand. From the battlefield to the sports field, this is living, accessible history told by crofters, criminals, servants, housewives, poets, journalists, nurses, politicians, prisoners, comedians, sportsmen, and many more. There several excerpts about Robert Burns, including a fascinating review by Henry Mackenzie in 1786.
Early birthday greetings go out to the great Scottish poet Robert Burns, who turns 250 on Sunday, January 25. In Rosemary Goring's recent account of Scottish history, Scotland: The Autobiography, she includes both the famous review by Henri Mackenzie of Burns's first collection of poems in 1786, and Sir Walter Scott's account of his meeting with Burns in 1787.
In a wide-ranging survey of recent books on Scotland in The New York Review of Books, Andrew O'Hagan notes that "Rosemary Goring's Scotland: An Autobiography is a spirited collection of witnessing from all periods of Scotland. The choices she makes are quite exquisite and collectively the book fulfills the very needful function of telling the Scottish story itself . . There are two hundred witnessings and it is hard to imagine many countries near Scotland's size being able to provide such a gigantic vision of human progress, ingress, regress, and finesse."
Tonight is Burns Night, the annual celebration of Robert Burns, Scotland's favorite son, who was born on this day in 1757. Also known as the Ploughman Poet, the Bard of Ayrshire and in Scotland as simply The Bard, Burns) is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and his birthday is celebrated worldwide.
