The Scottish poet Robert Burns has been idolised and eulogised. He has been sainted, painted, tarted-up and toasted. He is famous as the author of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and he has long been the patron saint of the heart-sore and the hung-over. But what about the poems? Beneath the cult of Burns Nights and patriotic yawps, there is the work itself, among the purest and most truthful created in any age.

This is a Burns collection like no other, introduced and arranged by novelist and essayist Andrew O'Hagan, it is a reader’s edition, made for the pleasure of reading and brings Burns’ work to full, riotous, colourful life.