Introduced by Professor Peter Butter. From his shattered childhood in Orkney to the turmoil of industrial Glasgow, Edwin Muir was witness to some of the most traumatic years and events of our modern age. And yet, in his life and in his art, he was constantly haunted by the symbolic 'fable' which he longed to find beneath the surface reality of the everyday. From his dream notebooks to his travels in Eastern Europe, Muir paints an unforgettable picture of the slow and sometimes painful growth of a poet's sensibility as he comes to terms with his own nature amidst the terror and confusion of the twentieth century. With a personal memoir by George Mackay Brown, an introduction and appendices by the noted Muir scholar Professor Peter Butter, and extra essays by Muir himself, this edition offers new insights into the life and work of one of Scotland's most important writers of the twentieth century. 'Wise, compassionate and often profound . . . an absorbing enquiry into the predicament of an exceptionally gifted person in the human situation of his time.' Sunday Times'One of the most unusual, most important autobiographies of our time.' Spectator