In Finding Out the Rest: History and Scotland Now James Robertson explores how the passage of time has an effect not only on individuals' views of their own lives, but also on the way a community or country perceives its history. The constitutional position of Scotland has been in flux for the last twenty years, since the establishment of its modern Parliament; in the referendum of 2014 the people rejected the proposition that the country should once again be independent; but since 2016 the Brexit debate has recharged and added urgency to the whole question of Scotland's place within the Union. In this essay Robertson tries to put current political obsessions into a historical context that stretches back over centuries, and argues that the past is never irrelevant to the present and future.
New Scottish Writing
