Drink deep - tonight we toast the poet Robert Burns. Photograph: Corbis
Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, great chieftain o' the puddin race!
That's right, it's haggis time. For Scots (and pseudo Scots) the world over, tonight is when we celebrate the great Robert Burns. And to mark the occasion, the Books site got novelist Andrew O'Hagan in to talk about the man and his poetry.
"He is the international romantic icon of the suffering poet, and of certain Scottish virtues - he likes a drink, he falls in love easily, he's tempestuous in his affairs. But he's also so much more than that," says O'Hagan. "He had a quality of empathy that made him innately political. He couldn't see a mouse in a field, shivering with cold, unhoused by his plough, without feeling an opportunity for political kinship - he too was a poor man who could be unhoused by landlords."
O'Hagan has just brought out a greatest hits of Burns' poems. The book includes not only a healthy dose of the political verses (with pithy introductions) but also the classic tributes to love and whiskey. I'll be reaching for them later, as the drams are passed around and the atmosphere turns maudlin.
And whether you've plans for tonight or not, you must at least listen to the love poem O, Wert Though in the Cauld Blast read in velvety Ayrshire tones. It will set you all of a-quiver, I guarantee.
• Listen now on your computer (14 mins)
• Subscribe to the Guardian Books podcast feed here, or here (via iTunes)
