James Kinsley, FBA, FRSL (17 April 1922 – 24 August 1984) was a Scottish literary scholar.
[1] Later in life, Kinsley studied to be a priest; he was ordained in 1963 and served as a curate in Beeston and from 1964 as a public preacher in the diocese of Southwell.
[1] Kinsley edited David Lyndsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits (1954); wrote Scottish Poetry: A Critical Survey (1954); compiled The Poems of John Dryden, which appeared in 1958 in four volumes; and edited Squyer Meldrum by Lyndsay (1959), The Works of Virgil Translated by John Dryden (1961), The Poems and Fables of John Dryden (1962), Annals of the Parish by John Galt (1967), The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (3 vols., 1968), The Oxford Book of Ballads (1969), Anecdotes and Characters of My Own Time by Alexander Carlyle (1973), and The Poems of William Dunbar (1979).
[3] He sometimes collaborated with his wife Helen, née Dawson, with whom he jointly authored Dryden: The Critical Heritage (1971).
[1] In 1977, Kinsley was an expert witness at the obscenity trial for the Sex Pistols album Never Mind the Bollocks.