Alan Riach, Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography: The Masks of the Modern Nation
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005
304 pp., ISBN 1403945918, £67
Iain Bamforth, The Good European
Manchester: Carcanet, 2006
280pp., ISBN 1857547659, £16.95
Reviewed by Peter McCarey
As far as I am aware, Alan Riach and Iain Bamforth have never met – though both have travelled to Samoa and to Geneva, where I recorded them reading their poems.[1]
To both of them, Samoa meant Stevenson. To Bamforth, Geneva means Calvin and Rousseau; to Riach it’s Conrad and Frankenstein. For one of them, Europe speaks basically German and French; for the other, world literature is written mostly in English.
Country
Re-reading these books gave me a flashback to the last time the English press confronted the prospect of Scottish independence – just before Riach and Bamforth started writing. It was when Tom Nairn published “Old Nationalism and New Nationalism” in The Red Paper on Scotland.[2] He was a bit hard on MacDiarmid, ruthless on Scottish kitsch and dead wrong, for my money, only on the locus of English kitsch: not the New Statesman and the TLS, but the royals.[3] The editor of that Red Paper on Scotland (one Gordon Brown) was deferential to MacDiarmid; but if Nairn provides an exemplary analysis, this man shows another kind of example: keep talking, dilute your Scotch, forget Europe and go easy on the socialism. Power is in London, in trust, and Scots have known all about stewardship for a long, long time.
Being a Scot is a matter of embarrassment: some, such as the Chancellor, are embarrassed by Scotland; others by Britain. In most countries I’ve worked in, when people ask where I’m from, it’s best when they’ve never heard of the place, because otherwise the word Scotland, in whatever language, is a source of mirth. Among intellectuals paid to know these things, let’s take Etienne Balibar, who concludes (though the reader is not privy to his reasoning) that Scottish is a regressive form of nationalism[4]… 'et s’il n’y a pas d’Etat il n’y a pas de nation'[5]
As the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Bamforth noted: 'Some wit has even daubed a Scottish Saltire alongside the Joseph Beuys and Keith Haring exhibits: no lost cause lost enough, it would seem.'[6] Eleven years later, he notes:
Musil, a man of many qualities, could have been describing the break-up of Ukania, our United Kingdom. (Substitute 'England' for Musil’s Austria, and 'Scotland' for Hungary and you get this observation: 'Britain,' he nearly wrote, 'did not consist of an English part and a Scottish part that … combined to form a unity, but of a whole and a part: namely, of a Scottish and a British sense of nationhood, and the latter was at home in England, whereby the English sense of nationhood actually became homeless.' But not for much longer, it seems.)[7]
Times change, and since 2000 they have changed some more. I would therefore have hoped from guidance from Riach’s book; here’s what we get:
“Whether or not a completely devolved or indeed independent parliament would offer resolution remains debatable…[8]
Scottish writers are frequently writers for whom their own land has become foreign in a specific sense. After 1603 and 1707, the project of the British Empire led to many of Scotland’s writers travelling abroad. This literally meant that the land of their childhood became far-away, never to be returned to … Scotland’s status within the United Kingdom relegates the idea of an autonomous national identity to the realm of fantasy … A nation without statehood is the condition of childhood, and children, like Scots, are both the victims and the perpetrators of empire.[9]
Is Riach telling the Scots to grow up or suggesting that arrested development is part of being Scottish? I hope the former and fear the latter. Though he acknowledges (for example) 'the atrocities of Scottish slave-owners in the West Indies'[10], his heart is with the good losers, 'the Celtic hero defiant even in the face of destruction, the Dying Gaul, hounded by empire to the edges of Europe, then finding on the other side of the Atlantic a regenerated myth of the furthering frontier in America'.[11] But the Scots on the other side of the Atlantic were the empire, and it was a Scot who, as lieutenant general and commander in chief for America, wrote the following to London, shortly after his arrival at New York with 6000 extra troops (including the Black Watch):
opposition [to royal authority] seems not to come from the lower People, but from the leading people, who raise the dispute, in order to have a merit with the others, by defending their Liberties, as they call them.[12]
Freedom was a noble thing once, what? That was John Campbell, fourth Earl of Loudoun; the National Galleries of Scotland hold a portrait of him by Allan Ramsay that must have been painted just prior to the ’45. The Scots weren’t just the outlaws; they were City Hall too. We ripped through the place like smallpox (incidentally – Anderson’s book[13] shows that Paul Muldoon’s 'Meeting the British' might equally have been written as 'Eating the British'). Riach wonders, here and there, why Scottish literature doesn’t seem to hold the same attraction as Irish lit, for critics. It’s simple: the glass slipper doesn’t fit.
Bamforth again: 'The peoples of Christendom, having been caught up, for much of their history, in the growth of the state power, are being taught, in the face of intensifying globalisation, the lessons of the Talmudic tradition, and living their identity, not in the absolutism of statehood but in the portable Jerusalem that wandered with the Jews through time.'[14]
A dream State? Perhaps. Can it guard against a nightmare nation?
Language
Under this heading I note that Bamforth’s book, though entitled 'The Good European', eschews any attempt at definition, and its Strasbourg focus is announced at the outset; by Strasbourg he means the city, not the Parliament. The heavy emphasis on German and French culture, and the total absence of Italy, cannot be read as a judgment. (Riach’s book, though it does assay definition, is not judgmental either – a virtue I’ll return to.) On subjects he has less direct knowledge of, such as Russian literature, Bamforth can be a little wikipaedic, but he was writing before the wiki was available, providing the reader with essential background.
With Riach, I return to an old dispute.
'Because English is the international language of modernisation, the mask is also the modern world'.[15]
That is Riach quoting Tim Cribb. When Cribb made the statement in 1992, there was truth in it. (I’m talking about the international language of modernisation, not about the mask business, which I don’t understand.) By the time Riach quotes it in 2005, much of that truth had seeped away; the English language accounted for roughly one third, and falling, of internet traffic. My guess is that Anglophonia peaked around the millennium and is gently going the way of French and Latin. There is no immediate need to invest in Chinese or Bahasa; English will see us out. But that’s part of the problem.
When I see Riach endorsing Marshall Walker’s comment, 'Poems look different after Pound',[16] I can almost hear Pound say 'I mean HAVE you ever heard of a language called French, or a man called Mallarmé?' (the very next page of Riach’s book says almost that, and misses the link; the accompanying overview of modernism is totally anglophone). Riach acknowledges the issue, when he mentions 'Aimé Césaire’s monoglot Prospero, foreclosing dialogue through the assertion of his own authoritative ignorance of other languages',[17] but is still capable of writing this:
The point [about satirical alienation and non-standard forms of English] is as apt in terms of Scots as it is of Gaelic and its long-term application has been international in the establishment of the centrality of the English language in our approaches to literature. American, Australian or New Zealand writing in English remains more approachable to an international readership in English than writing translated from native American Indian, Australian Aboriginal or Maori languages – or, until very recently, Gaelic.[18]
There is something awfully presumptuous about that “our”. It certainly doesn’t embrace the likes of Bamforth, whose work is an essential part of Scottish literature today.
Riach’s book does show an openness to non-anglophone cultures, but something more systematic will be needed, whether in terms of joint projects with other departments in the faculty of arts, or in terms of collaboration with literary historians in other countries, preferably countries that have had to come to terms with very powerful neighbours. Viet Nam is perhaps the most spectacular in terms of resilience against the odds, but there are plenty closer to home.
In such work, we all are at the mercy of translators (I say that more ruefully than most). Thereanent, I was struck by Riach’s quote from Tacitus; we have Calgacus in the field with his warriors before him, saying:
We, the last men on earth, the last of the free, have been shielded till to-day by the very remoteness and the seclusion for which we are famed. [The lads realise they’re getting this through Roman relay interpretation, so they make allowances. Calgacus continues:] We have enjoyed the impressiveness of the unknown.[19]
'The impressiveness of the unknown?' Each man raises an eyebrow and looks at the other. They check their earpiece and look round at the interpreter. There in the booth, with the earphones and microphone, is a penguin. A penguin classic, but all the same. They draw their bows. Since then they’ve never strayed from the Antarctic. Which brings us on to the next theme.
Kitsch
On the power of popular culture, Riach notes: 'We need to keep the value and danger of this potential in all art keenly in mind. Elitist disdain of ephemeral, populist, mass-produced work, or philistine disregard of high art and difficult work are equally inappropriate here'.[20] Agreed.
'Not despite the kitsch to which it is drawn is Mahler’s music great, but because its construction unties the tongue of kitsch, unfetters the longing that is merely exploited by the commerce that the kitsch serves.'
That is Theodor W. Adorno[21], quoted by Riach, who later paraphrases Adorno thus:
one of the major reasons why Mahler’s music is great is not in despite of the kitsch to which it is attracted, the melodrama, the whole range of what we mean by 'sound effects' – but because the construction of Mahler’s music allows us to understand the language of kitsch. It is crucially performative, utilising masks and descriptive gestures of all kinds, yet it is also profoundly informed by an intuitive feel for Austro-Hungarian folk-echoes, the rhythms and phrases of the Alps. He helps us to live in a world recognisably modern and contemporary precisely because of the saturation levels this language has reached. Mahler’s art – and that of others – allows us to see into the real human desire that is represented in clichés, caricatures and conventional pieties, which is summed up in kitsch and merely exploited by the commerce it serves.[22]
At this point, I don’t know whether I’m taking issue with Adorno or with Riach, but in any case – is the reader being asked to take 'Austro-Hungarian folk-echoes, the rhythms and phrases of the Alps' as elements of kitsch? If so, then the whole concept of popular culture purveyed in this book is suspect. At their best, the rhythms and phrases of the Alps keep company with popular music and balladry anywhere. Kitsch is not inherent in them. Let me counter-define the term.
If PoMo is today’s impression of yesterday’s dreams of tomorrow (and the architecture looks that way), then kitsch is how the middle classes present the lower orders to their superiors. The word is German, and the Scottish locus classicus is Walter Scott’s presentation of Edinburgh to King George IV, a German tourist. That, at any rate, was the first big set-piece. Thereafter it is a matter of entrepreneurs purveying local colour (the lower orders) to any tourists at all. I notice that the Swiss, in this respect, send themselves up quite nicely – and that is where the rhythms of the Alps become kitsch. Kitsch is not exploited by commerce; it is commerce, conducted under a tartan pelmet. Artists don’t use kitsch: it uses them, and I would suggest that it thrives in situations where artists find themselves representing, or selling, one people to another. This requires commercial connection and cultural disjunction; empires are perfect for the purpose.
James Hogg on Walter Scott: 'Yes, I say and aver, it was that which broke his heart, deranged his whole constitution and murdered him … a dread of revolution had long preyed on his mind; he withstood it to the last; he fled from it, but it affected his brain, and killed him. From the moment he perceived the veto of democracy prevailing, he lost all hope of the prosperity and ascendancy of the British Empire'.[23]
On the Austro-Hungarian, alpine connection, see Bamforth on Joseph Roth’s funeral:
Roth’s real faith being the Empire, an imperal aide-de-camp then stepped forward and laid a black and yellow wreath bearing the simple legend 'Otto'. It was a token of recognition from the Habsburgs to one of their most faithful subjects. The aide-de-camp recalled Roth warmly as 'a true fighter for the Monarchy', whereupon consternation broke out among Roth’s socialist friends, all of whom tried to shout the speaker down. Nostalgia can make of history itself a pathetic fallacy. Today the Austrian capital looks as if it had been put in aspic since Franz Josef’s glory days; Roth himself is not immune to the charge of high kitsch.[24]
Which brings us back to Riach’s paragon of Scottish popular culture, James Bond – who of course is on Her Majesty’s Secret Service, following Walter Scott in shamming potency for the amusement of the real power. As Riach puts it: 'As British imperial authority declines, the imperial power of America grows, but Britain – and Bond – rises in mythic status as models of benign patriarchal protectiveness for the American cousins.'[25] And again: 'My point is that it is only and exactly by providing him with a Scottish background that such rooted identity could be transcended in his “image” or mask – because, in the history of the British Empire, the Scottish nation had “transcended” itself. Bond’s only functional identity in that context is one of service.'[26] Tom Nairn had put it rather more harshly: 'It is true that political castration was the main ingredient in this rather pathological complex (such was the point of the Union), and that intellectuals have been unable to contemplate it for a long time without inexpressible pain. Still, there it was: the one thing which the Scots can never be said to have lacked is identity.'[27]
In this connection it is particularly interesting to read Chalmers Johnson on the dilemma confronting the United States today:
If we choose to keep our empire, as the Roman republic did, we will certainly lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates. There is an alternative, however. We could, like the British Empire after World War II, keep our democracy by giving up our empire.[28]
Kitsch flatters the ambitions of emperors, consoles them in their dotage and reconciles the subject peoples to their lot, if they’re not careful. Elitist disdain for kitsch would indeed be inappropriate: it is much too dangerous.
Canon
So what is worth reading, and why? This is the question at the heart of books such as these, and we are now in a position to consider the answers of Riach and Bamforth. In doing so, I must again focus on their approach, not the content, since both range very widely indeed – Riach examining several branches of the arts (including orchestral music, comic books and television drama), Bamforth considering several cultures. Let’s begin with one of the usual suspects.
'It was once remarked, in a university English department, that Shakespeare was the real torso, the centre of English studies – everything else mere limbs and appendages. The metaphor is flippant but the centrality of Shakespeare to the critical oeuvre of, for example, Harold Bloom, demonstrates a more serious truth about the way the pivotal position he occupies is understood and reproduced in the Anglo-American critical establishment.'[29] Note the shadow of Frankenstein behind that circular Anglo-argument, and now consider Riach on David Hume. (In writing this review, I have noticed that Riach is at his weakest when approvingly quoting others; I find myself quarreling more with the house guests than with mein host.)
In the section entitled 'The Enlightenment and its Discontents'[30], he endorses a trio of other critics, starting by agreeing with Adrian Poole, who reckons that there was something bloody odd about Hume’s equanimity in the face of death. Why couldn’t he take Dylan Thomas’s advice and rage a bit? All this enlightenment stuff surely means that you’re afraid of the dark. And why would a good atheist want to face death like some kind of Christian saint? Another suspicious thing about Hume: like Macbeth, he had no children or other such possessions. (Children – possessions?!) Now Riach quotes Nahum Tate, then Michael Long for the coup de grace (delivered several times, as though the corpse was refusing to be impressed):
The neo-classic answer to the radical incomprehension which is the Enlightenment’s response to the pleasure of tragedy, is given by Hume, and as Long says, it 'derives from a mentality which has no way of allowing that the contemplation of the uncontrollably destructive in life might be something in which a civilized mind would willingly engage. Hume therefore must reduce the impact of tragedy, modulate its passion into sentiment and its despair into elegy, and claim it as the function of “art” thus to present what is difficult in life in a form suited to the undisturbed entertainment of civilized men…'
'Long’s conclusion [says Riach] is crucial: “The failure is catastrophic. There is an entire dimension missing from the moral thought of both Johnson and Hume…”'
Conclusion? Shakespeare is confirmed the top torso, and Hume is relegated to somewhere near Scott.
To keep things brief, let’s set aside 'the pleasure of tragedy' – Riach’s phrase, which sits ill with the argument of Long, who’s not talking about pleasure at all, but about tragedy as a means of confronting the unacceptable. Long claims that Hume simply pretended nothing was wrong. Now, as any attentive reader of Hume will know – and Riach says it himself – Hume was at times 'a tormented spirit'. And what Hume discovered in the course of his work gave him no consolation whatsoever. He was, after all, the one who dismantled the notion of causality. In part III section 14 of the Treatise, he writes:
Thus, as the necessity, which makes two times two equal to four, or three angles of a triangle equal to two right ones, lies only in the act of the understanding, by which we consider and compare these ideas; in like manner the necessity of power, which unites causes and effects, lies in the determination of the mind to pass from the one to the other. … I am sensible that of all the paradoxes which I have had, or shall hereafter have occasion to advance in the course of this Treatise, the present one is the most violent…[31]
'Violent' is the word. No causality means no grounds for reason, and no possibility of objective agreement between humans on any point. No science, no tragedy either, including Shakespeare’s, because the entire inevitability of action is exposed as arbitrary, along with everything else. This is something that Shakespeare could not help with.
So did Hume, as Long suggests, play at never heed? See Bamforth: 'Nietzsche wanted to stand indomitable alone. David Hume had also attempted to “redeem” pride, but made no secret of the fact that having dissolved all causal bonds solely by sceptical introspection he needed to play a round of backgammon with friends in order to restore him to equilibrium. Nietzsche, on the other hand, felt obliged to repudiate all qualities that implied mutuality: the most perfect enemy was the friend.'[32]
David Hume had proven what others have intuited – that reason is grounded on convention, not on existence. Riach later refers to a novel by Patrick White in which the affective implications of the situation are set out: 'The heart of this vision is a barren rock, its attitude to European culture so massively indifferent that it annihilates every member of the expedition'.[33] Given the same choice as Nietzsche – return to the fold or accept that existence (which includes the stuff you’re made of) is utterly indifferent to your being – Hume chose human company. To return there, he used the simple, rough magic of backgammon, in which players agree on a meaning to bits of matter, the counters and patterns on a board. It is not true, but if we agree on it, it works. That’s human culture. In short, Hume mapped out the borders of the abyss and flagged the danger. He did indeed retreat, and saved his sanity. I can’t see that as a catastrophic failure.
Hume apart, Riach’s is an epicurean, permissive approach to Scottish culture that can only encourage students to explore and connect areas that had not previously been linked or, in some cases, seriously studied. This is a great and good thing. The sovereign virtue in Alan Riach’s critical approach, which must make him an excellent teacher, is that he really enjoys reading, and that pleasure is very important to him, and he wants to convey it, in spite of everything. When there is something clearly reprehensible about the authors he reads, he confronts it. In his discussion of Conan Doyle, he quotes what I guess is the most blatant, caricatural racism in the book, showing what is wrong and putting it in context. His approach to the heavily-flawed Fleming is similar. For Ezra Pound, Riach brings in Michael Long again to administer chastisement, and he points out how much more acceptable are the politics of Tom Leonard, but he refuses to pretend that Pound is therefore a worse poet. Riach never solves the problem, but he never hides it.
The general refusal to stand in moral judgment comes with a reluctance to pronounce aesthetic judgment on the work of living authors. Two examples: he mentions Maurice Lindsay’s Pocket Guide to Scottish Culture (1947) in the same breath as Sydney Goodsir Smith’s magnificent Short Introduction to Scottish Literature (1951),[34] which will cause sore disappointment to those who read Goodsir Smith first. Later, he devotes several hundred words to Ian Banks’s The Business, describing it as 'a thoroughly refreshing satire' and 'a risky book'.[35] On the strength of that, I went out and bought it. The way I see it, Riach owes me nine quid, since it’s Mills and Boon for boys, with a dash of socialist homiletics. Two hundred and forty pages in, I have yet to find a hint of narrative tension, or indeed of satire.
Cut to the sublime. Bamforth ventures: 'Surely no one can imagine visiting the Louvre and being smitten with an aura like … Rainer Maria Rilke, who in 1906 saw an early fifth-century BC torso of a youth from Miletus and wrote a poem – about the Word made not so much flesh as work of art – in which he instructed the reader: “You must change your life”.'[36] Well, this reviewer can, and he’s not unique. Also, though I don’t know German, I’m fairly sure that the injunction is not from Rilke to reader, but blindingly impersonal, the torso itself, and so much the more powerful for that.
One doctor on another, Bamforth notes that 'Chekhov made no mention of his impending death, and insisted in letters to his friends he was getting better'. Lev Shestov was scandalised by Chekhov’s calm in the face of death, and snapped: 'No man can admit right off that there is no way out.' (Odd how this deeply religious philosopher echoes the secular critics of Hume above.) Bamforth continues: 'He was unmistakably a dying man, but a man who lacked the rancour which Nietzsche, whom he read with interest around 1900, thought the sick foster against the living…'[37]
Bamforth is always judicious on Nietzsche, stern on Céline, whose “'… rhetoric, with its harping on extirpation as a therapeutic necessity, is part of a biomedical vision that in Germany legitimised Nazi doctrine: the medical profession as a whole played a significant role in obliterating the barrier between healing and killing.'[38]
Now it is Bamforth’s turn to use a presumptuous plural: 'The real scandal about Céline, according to Godard, is that we take pleasure reading an author whose ideas we condemn'.[39] But Bamforth is no epicurean: he is more of a stoic, or cynic, and the pleasure principle is not central to his take on literature. Such are the dangers of critical ventriloquy.
I would suggest, in any case, that the scandal of Céline is not one of complicity in evil notions; it’s a scandal of stupidity. In the astounding first 200 pages of Voyage au bout de la nuit, the narrator whips up an intoxicating contempt for the civilization that produced and prosecuted the Great War. It is a healthy reaction to industrialised madness. That contempt veers to paranoia later in the book, as the narrator takes ship for Cameroon, and it settles into dull misanthropy towards the end of the narrative, back in France between the two wars. By that stage, this reader’s pleasure in the work had abated to the extent that I was not inclined to proceed to the later novels, far less the tirades of idiot invective that Bamforth analyses for us. I might return to the novels, but they are long, life is short, and there are other great writers, and greater, that I haven’t got around to yet.
There is a secondary satisfaction in tracing the genealogy of such stories. Might Céline have read Kafka’s Amerika before writing the American episode of the Voyage? Had both of them seen Charlie Chaplin? How does Céline’s Cameroon compare with Conrad’s Congo? Without Céline’s take on the war, would Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five or Herr’s Dispatches have been conceivable? Unlikely. For sheer verve, Céline beats them all. But the others all – even Michael Herr – get over the scandal of war one way or another, reaffirming life with other people in a way that doesn’t reek of cabbage. As Riach and Bamforth show us in very different ways, that’s not easy. But this is as close as cynic and epicurean, intellectual and academic will come to agreeing on a canon.
In sum – Riach stakes out a huge fiefdom in English Studies, and Bamforth simply takes a walk or pilgrimage through Europe. In Bamforth, the Scottish perspective, rather like the medical one, is implicit, non-problematic and rich in insights. Riach has chosen to make the Scottishness explicit, which of course renders it thoroughly problematic, and his attempts to resolve or at least explain the problems raise other issues: the relationship between kitsch and popular culture, the difference between post-colonial English studies and world literature, the linguistic assumptions underlying this, and the legitimacy of treating philosophy as literary criticism. There is plenty in both books; too much for one review.
NOTES
[1] Extracts at http://www.knot.ch/sound.htm
[2] Edinburgh, EUSPB, 1975
[3] Nairn more than made up for that later. See The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy (London, Radius, 1988)
[4] Certaines nations ou certains groupes de nations doivent, par exemple, franchir ensemble le 'seuil' de la postnationalité, certaines sociétés doivent se 'dénationaliser' ou se 'transnationaliser' progressivement. Certaines nations traditionnelles doivent se dissoudre de façon plus ou moins dramatique. A nouveau, par conséquent, une alternative de progrès et de régression, d’expansion et de déclin. On croit observer le premier aspect dans le cas de l’Europe occidentale, préfiguré dans le projet d’Union européenne. On redoute le second dans le cas de la Grande-Bretagne (voir le brillant essai de Tom Nairn)… Etienne Balibar, Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’Etat, le peuple (Paris, Editions la découverte, 2001), p.34
[5]Balibar, p.41
[6] Bamforth, The Good European, 'Berlin Diary', p.55. Since all further Bamforth references are to this book, the rest will note only the chapter title and page quoted.
[7] 'You must change your life'; pp 95-6. Bamforth does not mention Tom Nairn, who made a similar point in After Britain (London, Granta, 2001); great minds, perhaps?
[8] Riach, Representing Scotland, introduction; p.11. Since all further Riach references are to this book, the rest will note only the chapter title and page quoted.
[9] 'Treasure Island and Time'; pp.92-4
[10] 'The International Brigade'; p.150
[11] 'Conclusion'; p.234
[12] Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America 1754-1766 (New York, Vintage, 2001), p.148.
[13] Fred Anderson, p.199
[14] 'Next Year in Jerusalem'; p.214
[15] T.J. Cribb, quoted in Riach, 'Introduction'; p.3
[16] 'The International Brigade'; p.126
[17] 'Shakespeare and Scotland'; p.39
[18] 'Foundation texts of Modern Scottish Literature'; p.66
[19] 'Conclusion'; p.232. Square brackets mine.
[20] 'Conclusion', p.231
[21] 'Introduction'; p.3 The Adorno text is 'Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy'
[22] 'Introduction', p.31
[23] James Hogg, The Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott (1882 edition), pp.95-6; quoted from Nairn op cit., p.34
[24] 'Scheherezade in Vienna'; p.47
[25] 'Nobody’s Children'; p.175
[26] 'Nobody’s Children', p.181
[27] Tom Nairn, 'Old Nationalism and New Nationalism', p.25
[28] http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=160594
[29] Riach, 'Introduction'; p.9
[30] pp. 54-7
[31] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book one, edited by D.G.C. Macnabb (Glasgow, Fontana, 1965) p.217
[32] The Good European; pp.272-3
[33] 'The Internatioanl Brigade'; p.156
[34] 'Introduction', p.22
[35] 'Nobody’s Children', p.185
[36] 'You Must Change Your Life', pp. 98-99
[37] See 'Five Postcards from Badenweiler for Zinovy Zinik'; pp.241-2
[38] 'Candour and Hygiene'; p.137
[39] 'Candour and Hygiene'; p.139
