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Emily Tamkin’s column on the US’s weak moral authority in international affairs (World View, 19 February) coincided with the death of Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was tortured in Guatemala in  1989 by security forces trained and equipped by the US. Once recovered, she revealed evidence of decades-long US complicity in human rights abuses in a war that cost more than 200,000 lives. The US’s methods in Latin America have changed since then but its agenda remains the same: protect regimes favourable to US policy even when they perpetrate gross abuses (Honduras, Haiti); undermine or...

With reference to Nicholas Lezard’s Twitter antagonist (Down and Out, 12 February), disdain for the banal might not be the evidence of high-minded seriousness some would assume. We find respect, even reverence, for the commonplace in poets such as William Blake, who famously wrote of seeing the world in a grain of sand, or the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (not noted for frivolity), who celebrated being able to “wallow in the habitual, the banal” after successful major surgery. Vermeer and other Dutch interior artists’ luminously detailed scenes of daily middle-class domesticity remain...

Burns night has been and gone, but poetry is for every night, and day. It’s a source of solace, comfort and cheer in difficult times like this current pandemic and lockdown So here, to help you through, are twenty of Scotland’s greatest poets, who aren’t Robert Burns. William Dunbar (circa 1459-1530) “Back to Dunbar!” was a favourite phrase of Hugh MacDiarmid, and the man he was talking about was a Middle Scots poet attached to the court of James IV, who wrote works that were rhetorical and lyrical marvels. Dunbar was one of a group of medieval Scots known as the “makars” an...

A Voice Above the Linn by Robbie Lawrence A poignant photographic tribute to a botanical master and friend.  In 2016, the photographer Robbie Lawrence travelled to a remote stretch of the west coast of Scotland. His destination was Linn Botanic Gardens, at the head of Cove Bay, on the Rosneath Peninsula. Established in 1971 by passionate botanist and gardener Jim Taggart, and with its own microclimate warmed by the Gulf Stream, Linn is home to almost 4,000 botanic species, many of which are endangered in the wild.   The biodiversity of the gardens has taken on an almost mythical sta...

27.11.2020 14:33 7060 The first in history collection of Abai’s songs in English language was presented online in London. The book was published by Kazakh Embassy in the United Kingdom with the support of the National Bureau of Translations and was dedicated to the 175th birth anniversary of the great Kazakh poet, philosopher and educator. It is worth noting that in addition to literary works, Abai left rich and varied musical legacy, which became an integral part of the Kazakh cultural identity. “Abai’s poetry is well known. His philosophica...