Clare Jackson
O Caledonia!
The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History
By Hugh Trevor-Roper (Edited by Jeremy J Cater)
Yale University Press 288pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
In January 1951, Hugh Trevor-Roper, later Lord Dacre, found himself spending New Year ‘among great frozen icebergs in the ultimate north, ie in Scotland’, a country then captivated by the daring seizure of the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey by four students the previous week. In a letter to the art critic Bernard Berenson, posthumously published in Letters from Oxford (2006), Trevor-Roper observed not only that, as the only English guest, he feared ‘a poisoned mince-pie’, but also that the outbreak of fervent Scots nationalism provoked by the theft had convinced him that ‘pure farce covers a greater field of history’ than economic causation, rendering ‘Gibbon ... a more reliable guide to that subject than Marx’. Trevor-Roper’s interest in Scotland and its history endured for a further three decades as he acquired a Scots wife and Scots country house, published iconoclastic articles on ancient Scottish constitutionalism, the Scottish Enlightenment and the Victorian cult of tartanry and, by 1981, had prepared the text of The Invention of Scotland, which has now been published.
The book’s tripartite structure considers ‘the political myth’ of ancient constitutionalism from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries; ‘the literary myth’ regarding Enlightenment interests in ancient Scottish poetry from c1760 to
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw