Robert Crawford writes:

One of the many strengths of Maggie Fergusson’s biography is that she does not sanitise her subject. He is presented neither as a northern St George, nor as a modern-day version of St Magnus, the patron saint of Brown’s archipelago. Fergusson feels and captures the importance of Orkney to Brown. She also communicates his strong, sometimes tortured spirituality and gives a good sense of his poetry. Fergusson is tempted at times by a version of Orkney as idyll: she could not have written this book were she oblivious to the beauty of the place through whose ‘eye of the needle’, as Seamus Heaney puts it, Brown ‘transforms everything’.

(LRB 22 February 2007)

John Murray | hardback 363 pp. |ISBN: 9780719556593