EXTRACT FROM ‘R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM: JANIFORM GENIUS’, BY PROFESSOR CEDRIC WATTS, ASLS CONFERENCE, STIRLING, 4 JULY 2015

R. B. Cunninghame Graham was amply a plethora of paradoxes. A romantic and a cynic; an idealist and a sceptic; a Don Quixote and a Hamlet; a nationalist and an internationalist; a socialist and a conservative; a revolutionary and a gradualist; a nobleman and a cowboy; a South American cattle-rancher and horse-trader who was also ‘the uncrowned King of Scotland’; a dandy and a convict; a Justice of the Peace who headed a riot; an anti-racist and an anti-Semite; an atheist and a defender of Jesuits. He opposed the Great War but then worked for the War Office; he opposed cruelty to animals but selected horses to suffer and die in battlefields; he was a Scottish landowning aristocrat who advocated the nationalisation of the land; an anarchist who was proud of his descent from King Robert II; a Marxist (according to Engels), yet he hoped to see Lenin hanged. He was a striving radical who declared the futility of such striving: ‘It results in nothing at the end,’ he said.