Is there a clean joke for Burns Night? I asked Cecil Parkinson...

As a life, it was a scintillating spectrum of the human condition. There was hardship and suffering, as well as laughter and fun, plus a great deal of sex, mostly extra-canonical. There were large, even universal perspectives, but also a fey and complex personality which did not sit easily with coherence. That may explain why no biographer has come close to doing him justice. This was a great man, always overshadowed by a weakened constitution and by social insecurity. His high talent was recognised as soon as he was published. Had he been a less restless, more accommodating personality, he could have settled down in the library of an aristocratic house, funded by some patron happy to secure his own immortality by serving as a grub in amber. There might have been several more decades and many more verses.

But that would not have been Robert Burns. He was too turbulent, too stravaging — and anyway, death had been stalking him for years. In our naivety, we are inclined to attribute completion to some geniuses who died young — Raphael, Mozart — because we cannot imagine how they could have equalled, let alone surpassed, their masterpieces. They could. There is a second group whose mastery is unsurpassable, but oh for many more examples: Masaccio, Giorgione. Finally, there are others whose incompleteness is a constant source of regret. Carel Fabritius, Keats and Schubert are obvious examples, all struck down while still mastering their craft; the glories that they left us a mere fragment of what might have been.