Iain Macleod
Macleod met Evelyn Hester Mason, "née" Blois, (1915–1999) in September 1939 whilst he was waiting to be called up for army service and she interviewed him for a job as an ambulance driver. After her first husband was killed in the war, they married on 25 January 1941. The Macleods had a son and a daughter, Torquil and Diana, who were born in 1942 and 1944 respectively. They had a somewhat stormy marriage in which they retained a strong bond despite Macleod conducting a number of what his biographer describes as "romances" with other women (he quotes love letters written by Macleod but does not specifically say they went as far as sexual affairs). As was common for MPs' wives of the era, Eve looked after constituency matters whilst her husband concentrated on his career at Westminster.
Dàin do Eimhir
The Eimhir cycle marked a sharp break in style and substance of Gaelic poetry from earlier eras. In his poetry, MacLean emphasized the struggle between love and duty, which was personified in the poet's difficulty in choosing between his infatuation with a female figure, Eimhir, and what he sees as his moral obligation to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. In Irish mythology, Eimhir is "the loveliest woman" in the Ulster Cycle and the wife of Irish hero Cuchulainn. MacLean said that the Eimhir of his poetry represented two real women in his life, Nessa O'Shea and an unnamed red-haired Scottish woman, but some critics have suggested that she actually represented three women, and, according to Christopher Whyte, there may have been as many as four. MacLean intentionally blurred the different Eimhirs together so that the individual women would not be distinguishable.