Robert Burns: A Life

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Brings together political history and literary criticism with a wide range of primary sources, including rare television footage and exclusive interviews with poets and politicians. She worked with John Buchan’s widow on his memorial anthology, The Clearing House (1946) and on her own autobiography, which was published, incomplete, as Lying Awake in 1950. For the edition, Creech commissioned Alexander Nasmyth to paint the oval bust-length portrait now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which was engraved to provide a frontispiece for the book. At Dumfries, he wrote his world famous song " A Man's a Man for A' That", which was based on the writings in The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, one of the chief political theoreticians of the American Revolution. Rare books by Robert Burns, including first editions, copies in fine bindings, and handsome sets of his collected works.

Robert Burns lived in, and was inspired by, Ayrshire, Edinburgh, and Dumfries, and the book includes a guide to key landmarks in the section ‘The Land o’ Burns’. His house in Dumfries is operated as the Robert Burns House, and the Robert Burns Centre in Dumfries features more exhibits about his life and works. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. As well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them.As a great admirer of the egalitarian ethos behind the American and French Revolutions who expressed his own egalitarianism in poems such as his "Birthday Ode for George Washington" or his " Is There for Honest Poverty" (commonly known as "A Man's a Man for a' that"), Burns was well placed for endorsement by the Communist regime as a "progressive" artist.

McIntyre is enthusiastic but always objective and his work brings us the clearest, most sharply appreciated portrait of this great poet.After the grace comes the piping and cutting of the haggis, when Burns's famous " Address to a Haggis" is read and the haggis is cut open. For an alternative look at Burns’ life and work you could do worse than get a copy of ‘Fickle Man: Robert Burns in the 21st Century’ which was published in 2009 by Sandstone Press.