"One of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s aims seems to have been to defend Scottish literature against archaising folk-revivalists. (His neoclassicism, however, was a ‘rearmament programme’.) ‘There is no need for Scotland to be different from other nations,’ he wrote in 1966, in his short Autobiographical Sketch. ‘We should have a contemporary literature like everywhere else.’" Fatima Ahmed • LRB

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