Scottish History Quotes

“[Connor to Major Wentworth, grandson of King George]

"My fathers were lairds in the Highlands when yours were still farmin' kale back in Germany!”
― Pamela Clare, Defiant

“She was convinced the country was about to succumb to revolutionary socialism. Her own circumstances encouraged this belief: just on the edge of the really rich country set, she shared their views and opinions but lacked the financial and architechtural insulation from real or imagined political troubles. She found crushed larger cans and cigarette packets in her front garden and interpreted these as menacing signals from the Perthshire proletariat. Every flicker and dim of electric light was a portent of class war.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“Burton's History of Scotland and the widespread welcome it received, both within the nation and internationally, is incompatible with the view that Scottish history suffered a mortal decline, that there was some kind of atypical, catastrophic failure of national historical confidence in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, the country produced, and welcomed, a national narrative that incorporated the full range of characteristics typifying the national histories produced around the same period across Europe.”
― Craig Beveridge, Recovering Scottish History: John Hill Burton and Scottish National Identity in the Nineteenth Century

“In historical literature, Scotland has taken the lead of every other European country. This makes it not a little remarkable, that no continuous and complete national history has been attempted until very recently. The contributions of Robertson, Pinkerton, Laing, Hume, and we may add to the list, McCrie, Cook, and others, refer chiefly to insulated periods, more or less interesting; and allowing for the prejudices and predelictions of some of the writers, they all form either valuable portions, or amusing fragments of the Scottish annals.”
― John Hill Burton, Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 1

“Scott found himself caught between a deep-seated loyalty to, and knowledge of, his country and an equally fundamental commitment to the Union with England. He sought to find a way for Scotland to accommodate its sense of identity with the economic and other benefits of being a partner in the greatest empire the world had yet seen, This was both a deliberate and a subconscious for a highly intelligent, complex, energetic and emotional man. To complete it successfully, the Scottish past had to b turned into a kind of serious playground, rich in possibility except for the possibility that it might inform the future in some disruptive way. Scott well knew, because of the way he himself was affected by it, that Scottish history had the potential to release grear energy: fascinated by it, he nevertheless felt a need to keep it, like a wild animal, behind a barrier of time. It was therefore fitting to his purpose that he should make the extraordinary claim to his tens of thousands of readers - in a book aimed particularly at the young - that nothing worth drawing to ther attention had occurred in Scotland in the pasr eighty years.”
― James Robertson, Finding Out the Rest: History and Scotland Now