G-20 Meltdown Flyers!

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/03/423593.html

Shelley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley

The Dark Times

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.

Bertolt Brecht

City Art Gallery - Edinburgh

http://www.bobdylanart.com/

Robert Burns: The Patriot Bard

This new biography of Scotland’s national poet explodes the Burns myth, replacing the ram-stam lad of popular cliché with the real, living Burns. He is revealed as a Scottish patriot of the heart, an idealist who wished for ‘Freedom and Liberty’ for his beloved Scotland, but also a man who was pragmatically a British patriot who risked his life for democratic reform.

In Robert Burns: The Patriot Bard, the greatest of Scotland’s poets is placed within the true context of his times. He was a son of the Enlightenment, whose inspiration came from both Scottish and English poets, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of Independence and the French Revolution of 1789. Burns is painted in his native colours as a highly complex, hyper-intelligent writer in both prose and poetry, not the semi-confused contradictory simpleton of previous biographies. The fascinating legend of Burns as ladies’ man is placed where it should be, as less important than the message of the bard.

The real day-to-day Burns was irascible, stubborn-minded, independent, controversial and opinionated. His voice was always in the language of the people and his idealist vision of a better world lifted him from being exclusively a patriotic Scottish and British poet to a poet of humanity ‘the world o’er’. Drawing from Burns’ existing canon of poetry and letters, plus some newly attributed works suppressed for over two centuries, this life story is a roller-coaster narrative that charts the success and untimely death of the greatest songwriter of all time, the real Robert Burns.

Guardian Review of Burns the Radical by Liam McIlvanney

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/jan/25/featuresreviews.guardianreview7

The Canongate Burns

http://www.word-power.co.uk/books/the-canongate-burns-I9781841953809/

Drawing on extensive scholarship and the poet's own inimitable letters, this edition offers a wealth of information on Burns's life, the hardships of his early days, his political beliefs, his hatred of injustice, and his fate as a writer too often sentimentalized by biographers and critics. Through his poetry, and as if for the first time, we see Burns as a radical figure in a British as well as a Scottish context, the peer of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Byron in the revolutionary and repressive world of the 1790s.

Containing recently attributed and never-before-published poems demonstrating that the poet's political sympathies were more radical than he could safely put his name to in public, The Canongate Burns also includes the sexually scandalous verses known as "The Merry Muses, " originally circulated only in handwritten copies. This major and definitive edition offers vitally fresh insights into the irreverent spirit and the democratic convictions of Scotland's greatest poet.