The disjuncture from politics, on the other hand, springs from something which concerns all these poets: the shattered nature of Scottish consciousness, which isn’t a low flat floor of peasant culture on which all stand together but a wild junk-yard of high culture fragments, English imports, oral traditions of ‘the Scots commons’ and proletarian ‘socialist realism’ from the thirties.

I went into journalism in a grandiose way. I thought maybe I’d do a little journalism whilst I write the great novel of all time you see – one has to keep oneself afloat.

Broadly speaking, most people lived their lives in a kind of unwilling conformity. The thing was that they were offered, as time went by, various kinds of freedom, most of which were sort of dummy freedoms somehow.

The way that words mutate reminds me of fashions in music. The word – the note – is a constant. But the setting and chord in which it occurs alters with the mood of a nation from major to minor, from the assertive to the mournful and foreboding.

To be defeated, but not to give in, is victory.

I think England has been in the long-term damaged by Britishness.

Who invented political tolerance? The English invented it, it’s something which has taken roots with some difficulty in Scottish politics.

I’m always interested in debunking myths if they are untrue. But it’s also important to identify myths and how they function, what value they may have.

On the Black Sea, my father saw it begin. And on the Black Sea, seventy years on, I saw the beginning of its end.

The disjuncture from politics, on the other hand, springs from something which concerns all these poets: the shattered nature of Scottish consciousness, which isn't a low flat floor of peasant culture on which all stand together but a wild junk-yard of high culture fragments, English imports, oral traditions of 'the Scots commons' and proletarian 'socialist realism' from the thirties.