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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Hugh MacDiarmid
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(pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892–1978) Scottish poet, much involved with Scottish nationalism and left-wing politics, who defined his duty as a poet as being not 'to lay a tit's egg, but to erupt like a volcano, emitting not only flame but a lot of rubbish'. In the 1920s he began to write in an artificially revived version of a Scots dialect (see *Lallans), looking for his model not to *Burns but much further back, to *Dunbar; he was particularly successful with this idiom in the long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926).
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In 1928 he was a founder member of the *SNP, and in 1934 he joined the *Communist Party of Great Britain (his output at this period included two 'hymns to Lenin'). Expelled from the party in 1938 for 'national deviation', he demonstrated his cussedness by rejoining in 1957, a year after Russia's invasion of Hungary.
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