Like seventeenth century visitors to Scotland, they [English historians] tend to dismiss it as a barbarous country populated only by doltish peasants… - Hugh Trevor-Roper

I used to think that historical events always had deep economic causes. I now believe that pure farce covers a far greater field of history, and that Gibbon is a more reliable guide to that subject than Marx.

Scotland had already had a religious revolution. By an irony which seems also a law of history, the new religion of Calvinism, like Marxism today, had triumphed not in the mature society which had bred it but in undeveloped countries where the organs of resistance to it were also undeveloped.

After that date , intelligent Scotchmen rejoiced in the removal of their national politics to London. That enabled them to get on with the long delayed improvement of their country which, till then, had remained, as they admitted, "the rudest of all the European nations". In the eighteenth century, the energy which had hitherto been wasted or frustrated in futile politics was devoted to "improvement" and the rudest of its nations became the admired model of Europe.