Books by Robert Crawford

The second volume of Robert Crawford's magisterial biography of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet and troubled man, drawing on extensive new sources.In this compelling and meticulous portrait of the twentieth century's most important poet, Robert Crawford completes the story he began in Young Eliot. Drawing on extensive new sources and letters, this is the first full-scale biography to make use of Eliot's most significant surviving correspondence, including the archive of letters (unsealed for the first time in 2020) detailing his decades-long love affair with Emily Hale. This long-awaited second volume, Eliot After 'The Waste Land', tells the story of the mature Eliot, his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, and his troubled interior life. From his time as an exhausted bank employee after the publication of The Waste Land, through the emotional turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, and his years as a firewatcher in bombed wartime London, Crawford reveals the public and personal experiences that helped generate some of Eliot's masterpieces. He explores the poet's religious conversion, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, and his great work Four Quartets. Robert Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human being: as a husband, lover and widower, as a banker, editor, playwright and publisher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.

''Curriculum Violette'' is poet and biographer Robert Crawford''s commemoration of Violette Szabo (1921-45), the remarkable French-born British agent who fought alongside members of the Resistance in wartime France and who died at Ravensbr├╝ck concentration camp. Published to mark the centenary of her birth, ''Curriculum Violette'' uses familiar forms - most obviously that of the CV - to present Violette Szabo''s multifaceted life in England, France, Scotland, and Germany. Pithily and arrestingly, it sums up a life whose insistent humanity shines through the timetabled, mechanical systems of military and civilian life, and even through the bureaucracy of death.''The work is published in English/French parallel text.

TBC

disAPPOINTED: There is always room for improvement in all of us! Your outlook and perceptions of life's various situations determine the person you will become or have became. disAPPOINTED will help you redefine the struggles you have had in life. It will help you discover your determination to recover, and help you manifest your own strength and courage through Jesus Christ. It aids you in seeing the lesson for the blessing by reminding you when you are disAPPOINTED that God said "Didn't I Say Appointed!"

Australia's advertising agencies enjoyed their reputation as a glamorous and fun place to work. Not surprisingly, many of the nation's brightest and most creative people were drawn to advertising. Behind Glass Doors ventures into the offices to reveal the inner workings of the Australian advertising business during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Engaging with Zoroastrian, Chinese and Greek as well as with Scottish antecedents, Crawford's poems have an arresting range and a lyrical energy. Ranging from Jerusalem to Iona, New York City to Shetland, this is a collection of international range that continually zeroes in on the particular - and the particularly Scottish.

A mere forty miles apart, these cities have enjoyed a scratchy rivalry since wistful Edinburgh lost parliamentary sovereignty and defiant Glasgow came into its industrial promise. Crawford brings them to life between the covers of one book, in a tale that mixes novelty and familiarity, as Scotland's cultural capital and largest commercial city do.

Eliot wanted no biography written, but this book reveals him in all his vulnerable complexity as student and lover, stink-bomber, banker and philosopher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.

From Treasure Island to Trainspotting, Scotland's rich literary tradition has influenced writing across centuries and cultures far beyond its borders. Here, for the first time, is a single volume presenting the glories of fifteen centuries of Scottish literature. In Scotland's Books poet Robert Crawford tells the story of Scottish writing and its relationship to the country's history. Stretching from the medieval masterpiece of St Columba's Iona - the earliest surviving Scottish work - to the imaginative, thriving world of twenty-first-century writing with authors such as Ali Smith and James Kelman, this outstanding collection traces the development of literature in Scotland and explores the cultural, linguistic and literary heritage of the nation. It includes extracts from the writing discussed to give a flavour of the original work, full quotations in their own language, previously unpublished works by authors and plenty of new research. Informative and readable, this is the definitive guide to the marvellous legacy of Scottish literature.

A study of the Scottish female writer and dramatist Liz Lochhead.

How writers have imagined the idea of Scottish independence over 700 yearsPoet and critic Robert Crawford explores in eloquent detail the literary-cultural background to Scottish nationalism in the lead-up to the referendum on independence for Scotland in September 2014. He begins with the totemic Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, in which the Scots routed the English and preserved their independence until the two nations peacefully united in 1707. Continuing up to the present day, he examines how writers have set out in poetry, fiction, plays and on film the ideal of Scottish independence. Publication coincides with the 700-year anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, 1314-2014.This engagingly written volume begins with an English poet-in-residence at the 1314 battle. The book then traces how that famous victory has been interpreted and reinterpreted imaginatively. It moves from vivid medieval epics in several languages through the Romantic political imagination of Robert Burns to the striking part played by twenty-first-century poets, novelists, and dramatists in creative attempts to answer the 2014 question: 'Should Scotland be an independent country?'Here are the nationalist poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid and the gore of Braveheart and Black Watch; the Surrey novelist who celebrates Scotland's political freedom in her international best-seller, and the bisexual Jewish American who develops a nuanced theory of Scottish nationalism in opposition to the oppressive rhetoric of fascism. Bannockburns concludes with a spirited discussion of literature and Scotland's 2014 referendum. From The Bruce to contemporary literature and modern-day campaigning, Bannockburns is revelatory.

No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns. To his international admirers Burns was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, and to his political enemies a 'traitor'. This biography presents the remarkable life, loves and struggles of this great poet.

This text not only offers a fresh introduction to the different belief-systems flourishing across the modern world, but asks us to consider how the very boundaries of faith might be drawn now and in the future.