The hammer of the Scots

This is a book from beyond the grave — the last that Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, and though it is unfinished, there is no mistaking the sting in the tale. There was nothing the Regius Professor of History at Oxford enjoyed more during his lifetime than annoying the Scots. From time to time he would break off from larger works and pen an article or an essay on a theme with which Scottish historians became wearily familiar: that the story of Scotland before the Union was one of fractious rebellion and economic decline; that the country had only come into its own following the Treaty which united it with England in 1707; that devolution, with its promise of a separate parliament, was a slippery slope which threatened the break-up of the United Kingdom; that the Scots (or Scotch as he preferred to call them) were woefully ignorant of their own history.