¹ The lecture exposed the inauthenticity of the kilt tradition.

² The History of Highland Dress (London, 1962).

³ ‘May they perish who have expressed our bright ideas before us’: Aelius Donatus, the 4th-century Roman grammarian.

⁴ Sir Thomas (‘Tam’) Innes of Learney (1893–1971), Lord Lyon King of Arms (an office of state in Scotland) 1945–69, compiler of The Tartans of the Clans and Families of Scotland (1938; revised 1964). As Lord Lyon, he regarded himself as custodian of the spirit of Caledonia: he was probably the last laird to speak unaffectedly in the Doric dialect.

⁵ He never did so, but they were published in his posthumous book The Invention of Scotland.

¹ Mary Lascelles (1900–95), Tutor in English Language and Literature, Somerville College, Oxford, 1931–60, Fellow 1932–67; Lecturer in English Literature, Oxford University, 1960–6, Reader 1966–7; editor of Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.

² T-R probably had in mind the comments on accents in Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland: ‘The conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities wear fast away; their dialect is likely to become in half a century provincial and rustick, even to themselves. The great, the learned, the ambitious, and the vain, all cultivate the English phrase, and the English pronunciation, and in splendid companies Scotch is not much heard, except now and then from an old lady.’

³ Martin Martin (d. 1718), physician, natural historian, ethnographer, and collector of curiosities in the Hebrides, published his compendious Description of the Western Islands of Scotland in 1703.

⁴ Described in Giancarlo Carabelli, Tolandiana (1975), p. 14.

⁵ John Toland (1670–1722), the deist whose other works included Christianity not Mysterious (1695).

⁶ Within the Church of Scotland, persons convicted of a breach of the biblical commandment against adultery were made to stand on a raised platform called the cutty-stool.

¹ Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–89), Grand Ayatollah in Iran, leader of the 1979 revolution, and thereafter supreme leader of his country.

² Scottish variant of ‘screech’.

³ The degree was awarded by the University of the South in Tennessee (‘Sewanee’).

⁴ Dunbar had compiled a case-list of Samuel Johnson’s ‘gross incivility to Scottish hosts’, drawn from Boswell’s life, and from ‘the extremely unfavourable evidence collected for Croker by that honest, scholarly and eminently fair-minded man, Walter Scott, about J’s behaviour in Glasgow and at Dunvegan’ (letter of 13 April 1980).

⁵ First published in the Edinburgh Review for 1805.

¹ John Pinkerton (1758–1826) was a numismatist and collector of Scottish ballads who wrote a vehement essay on literary forgery. His historical writings, including An Enquiry into the History of Scotland preceding the reign of Malcolm III (1789), distressed his compatriots by their emphasis on the congenital inferiority of the Celts, and by arguing that the Picts were descended from ancient Goths. He figures in T-R’s The Invention of Scotland.