Few things cry so urgently for rewriting as does Scots history, as in few aspects of her bastardised culture has Scotland been so ill-served as by her historians.

The chatter and gossip of half the salons and drawing-rooms of European intellectualism hang over the antique Scottish scene like a malarial fog through which peer the fictitious faces of heroic Highlanders, hardy Norsemen, lovely Stewart queens, and dashing Jacobite rebels.

Those stage-ghosts shamble amid the dimness, and mope and mow in their ancient parts with an idiotic vacuity but a maddening persistence.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish Scene or The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Albyn (1934)