The Bard

Crawford has delivered a living Burns: smart, arrogant, chivalrous, but also a strong poet to be confronted at every step of our written and sung culture. After this, we can't just take Burns down from the shelf this one night a year

Brian Morton, Observer

Crawford has produced an act of homage as well as a fine biogrpahy

Sunday Times

Crawford is a sensitive chronicler of the poet and dogged debunker of the mythology that the legend of Burns has accreted over the centuries

Colin Waters, Sunday Herald

Generous, highly intelligent and comprehensive biography...a portrait that comes nearer to the whole man than any other yet written...I can't imagine a better life of the Bard being written. It is likely to become the standard work: certainly it deserves to be greeted as that

Literary Review

If you go into it knowing nothing of him you will emerge with understanding and admiration

Susan Hill, The Lady

It is in the tonal analysis of Burns's poems that Crawford is at his best in this outstanding book ... it is beautifully produced, with an unpretentious elegance that Burns would have approved

John Carey, New York Review

Lively, learned accounts of often misinterpreted lives

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

Magnificent... This is a fine biography, and it is difficult to imagine its being surpassed for a very long time

Alexander McCall Smith, Daily Telegraph

Robert Crawford gives us a sympathetic portrait of a self-fashioning Burns who has to imagine himself as a bard - a poet not only in word but in act - in order to become one. Crawford's Burns, merrily mixing high and low culture, seems eerily contemporary

New Yorker