The Thistle and the Rose Six Centuries of Love and Hate Between the Scots and the English

by Allan Massie

In an elegant narrative that ranges over 600 years, Allan Massie lays bare the powerful and turbulent relationship between the Scots and the English.

Genres: History, British Literature, Scotland, Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Allan Massie was a Scottish journalist, sports writer and novelist. He was one of Scotland's most prolific and well-known journalists, writing regular columns for The Scotsman, The Sunday Times (Scotland) and the Scottish Daily Mail. He was the author of nearly 30 books, including 20 novels. He is notable for novels set in the distant past and Vichy France.

Reviews

[Gavin]

Light history via biographies of the obvious (Mary Queen, Scott, Livingstone, Buchan) and nearly unknown (Waugh’s granddad, a soldier called Henry Dundas). Charles Churchill on Scots:

Into our places, states and beds they creep;
They've got sense to get what we want sense to keep.

Weighted towards mongrel literary figures and quashing polarisations; Anglo-Scots and pro-Stuart Englishmen feature heavily. (Disproportionately.) He’s soft on empire and Thatcher, is unjudgmental in general. Welcome scepticism about some organising myths – the idea of a race called the ‘Celts’, the idea that Scotland is or has ‘always’ been more Left (when e.g. half the votes in 1955 were Tory).

[Victoria Schreiber]

Not a history book, but a collection of essays by the author that focuses on different aspects of the English and Scottish relationship. Overall, I liked most of the essays, though some were less interesting to me personally. The writing style is also good overall though I wish the authors would have used footnotes during the first, more historical, part. Especially this first part was very interesting to me and while I skipped some of the later essays (due to the fact that their first page did not appeal to me), those that I did decide to read were good.