"Mackay Brown despaired of modernity, and felt that the time-honoured worship of ‘the Word’ was now replaced by worship of ‘the Number’. He rarely left Orkney, and only visited England once, a traumatic trip to London, where the scale of the city appalled him, and he only left Scotland again to stay with his friend Seamus Heaney, in Ireland." Nigel Wheale Fortnightly Review

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