Hugh Trevor-Roper

"Now this doctrine of Carlyle, which the history of Nazism so aptly illustrates, depends upon two premisses of doubtful validity: firstly, that "greatness", or any other merely abstract conception, is desirable; secondly, that the human character is constant,—for a great man can clearly be trusted with absolute power only if his qualities remain "great". The opposite doctrine to this is the doctrine summarised by Lord Acton in his famous aphorism, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely": the doctrine that power is not merely the effective expression of a fixed character, but can affect and alter the character which exercises it. The history of Nazism suggests that this doctrine is true."

"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."

"Like seventeenth century visitors to Scotland, they [English historians] tend to dismiss it as a barbarous country populated only by doltish peasants manipulated, for their own factious ends, by ambitious noblemen and fanatical ministers. And equally, they see the English occupation of Scotland merely as imposed, for the sake of order, on an exhausted land. Even Scottish historians have hardly sought to fill this gap. As far as published work is concerned, the sociology of seventeenth Scotland remains a blank."

"England and Scotland were poles apart... In England population, trade, wealth had constantly increased. New industries had grown up and found new markets in a richer, more sophisticated lay society at home. The economic growth of England had been extraordinary and had created, however unequally, a new comfort and a new culture. But in Scotland there had been no such growth. There was little trade, little industry, no increase of population. Always poor and backward, it now seemed, by contrast, poorer and more backward still. That contrast is vividly illustrated by the comments of those who crossed the Tweed, in either direction. We read the accounts of English travellers in Scotland. Their inns, cries Sir William Brereton, are worse than a jakes; and he breaks into a sustained cry of incredulous disgust at that dismal, dirty, waste, and treeless land. Then we turn to the Scottish travellers in England. "Their inns", exclaims Robert Baillie, "are like palaces"; and Sir Alexander Brodie of Brodie, goggling at all the wicked fancies and earthly delights of London, reminds us of a bedouin of the desert blinking in the bazaar of Cairo or Damascus."

"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 [1707], 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."

"It amuses me to hear some of my Scotch friends, who have leapt nimbly on to the new band-wagon, speaking as if, with independence, Scotland would be the same as before, only independent. Will it even be as large as before? The native historian of the Orkney Islands closes his work with the remark that the only advantage that the Orkney islanders gained from their annexation by Scotland in 1468 was "the ultimate advantage of annexation to Great Britain" in 1707. They may well prefer to be ruled by London rather than from Glasgow, to which political power in an independent Scotland will naturally gravitate, and where it will no doubt be exercised—since they too are good at that kind of politics—by the Irish. This will perhaps compensate them for their inability to rule the Scots of Ulster from captured Belfast."

"The Government spokesmen...insist that, once the assembly is established, the SNP will wither away... Thanks to the assembly, Scotch nationalism will have been scotched. The leaders of the SNP do not agree with this reasoning. If they did, they would oppose the assembly as an unacceptable substitute for their own essential demands, a stone offered instead of bread. In fact they have decided to vote for the assembly, confident that they can use it as a stepping-stone towards their own objective. For after all, they can say, the opportunities of making trouble in the assembly will be many. There can be disputes over the spending of the money, disputes over the restraints on the assembly, both political and financial. Even practical incompetence can be useful; for in every case the blame can be concentrated on a very convenient scapegoat, the reserved powers of Westminster. In this way the assembly, which has been devised to halt the advance of the SNP, will be an excellent means of accelerating that advance: an advance far beyond the limited aims of the government: an advance to sovereignty."

"To this the government reply is, in effect, "wait and see". We are assured that once the sensible Scots people have elected sensible, practical men to represent them in the assembly, all these grim forebodings will prove mistaken. The assembly-men will settle down and make good laws within the limits set, and the claims of the SNP will dissolve in mere noise."

"The Regius Professor's methods of quotation might also do harm to his reputation as a serious historian, if he had one."