This is a personal portrait of the Scottish poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, his life and work, by Christopher McIntosh, his friend of nearly three decades, who took part in many of his battles and campaigns. McIntosh recounts Finlay's emergence as an avant-garde writer and poet in the 1950s, the creation, together with his wife Sue, of his famous garden at his home Stonypath-Little Sparta in Lanarkshire, his espousal of the ideals of the French Revolution, his defence of classical values, his idiosyncratic form of paganism (Little Sparta was dedicated to Apollo), his struggle against...