At the Edinburgh Book Festival this year, Dr David Starkey, the television historian and iconoclast, pronounced that history was elitist - it was about kings and queens and power-brokers rather than the marginal or the dispossessed. He liked big and important subjects. He was uninterested in peasants. Neal Ascherson, by contrast, is deeply interested in peasants. Indeed, he believes that it is only by studying the character of the peasant class, those who are conditioned by the land on which they live and work, that we can reach an understanding of the character of a nation - in this case, Scotland.

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