Even a posthumous and partially reconstructed volume from the pen of Hugh Trevor-Roper is likely to retain interest, if only for the familiar bite and elegance, and his editor, Jeremy Cater, has achieved a worthwhile compilation from material in the Trevor-Roper Nachlass. The title recalls a previous one, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1992), and with some justification since two of the chapters in the present work first appeared there: the hilarious exposure of the history of the kilt and another of tartan in general. Likewise, the first two chapters of The Invention of Scotland, centering on the rise and fall of George Buchanan's fantasies about the history of Scotland saw the light in more primitive form many years ago. But Cater's compilation goes far beyond reproducing published work and pays some homage to Trevor-Roper's long-standing obsession with the dangers of Scottish nationalism, past and present, and the place of bad history in sustaining its claims. For a protracted period in the 1970s lasting until at least the accession of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister, which helped the specter of Scottish independence recede as a practical possibility, Trevor-Roper directed his corrosive curiosity at certain styles of Scottish myth making: the sartorial, which he had already exposed as rooted in nothing; the political, with its certainties about a constitutional history of the Highlanders and their supposed kings that could be traced back to a genuine Dark Age of Caledonian greatness; and, increasingly, to a literary phantasmagoria connected with the great fraudster James Macpherson, who came to assume the criminal proportions of Sir Edmund Backhouse, Trevor-Roper's other subject of study outside his specialism in the early modern period. These three inventions dominate the account here, and the less well-known sections are woven around three individuals notable for their creative imagination: Hector Boece, George Buchanan and the Hamlet of deception, and James Macpherson and his accomplices.

Thanks to the certainties of Fordun, forty-five (invented) kings decorated Scottish “history” before Boece gilded them still further in his Scotorum Historiae (1575) with the status of a civilized Volk “who in the centuries before Christ, had preserved, first in Spain, then in Ireland, and finally in Scotland, the wisdom of Egypt, the literature and philosophy of Greece” (24–25). These achievements were then made whig by the greatest Latinist of his day, George Buchanan, in reaction against the demolition of Boece perpetrated by a scholar who was not even Scottish, Humphrey Lhuyd. Buchanan's own History, when it finally appeared in 1582, trashed the upstart Lhuyd and acquired a reputation across Europe for unrivaled scholarship despite attempts at suppression in England that Trevor-Roper details with an amused detachment. Yet, we should really speak of Boece-Buchanan as a joint creator of an imaginary world that provided Scots with a past they never had.

Their natural successor, James Macpherson, built on their castle in the air by providing a witness to the Highlanders’ claims to represent an Urvolk. One of their kings, Fingal, supposedly retained a bard, Ossian, and Macpherson, following a period of incompetent but persistent fieldwork among the Gaelic peoples of the northwest, “discovered” among the manuscripts that he had collected an epic poem by Ossian, whom Macpherson projected as a sort of Celtic Homer and from whose celebrity he made a great deal of money. The scene is almost designed for Trevor-Roper's forensic mastery, and over more than a hundred pages—much the longest section of the book—he peels away the conscious lies and damaging self-deceptions that surrounded Macpherson's forgery, because, of course, he had written Fingal himself after stitching together bits of material from the various “old” manuscripts that had come his way. The story takes us to London and eventually to India as members of Macpherson's family and clan become infolded in his legends as a sort of historiographical mafia. Only the coming of Thomas Innes with his withering destruction of Macpherson's claims began the process of Fingal's retreat into fiction.

These three stories—the constitutional, the literary, and the sartorial—make a connected theme, and there is no doubt that Trevor-Roper intended publishing them as a book to resist the incorporation of what he called “myth” into history. But there were problems over doing so in the short term and worries over his conception in the longer, which raise questions about the rightness of publishing now. His editor suggests a number of reasons for Trevor-Roper's failing to publish his account, but one of them he omits. It feels cheap to insert the Hitler diaries into the argument, but an author ready to announce that “even the greatest historians are led into error” (62) must have felt some apprehension at setting himself up as a guide to crystalline truth in the wake of personal humiliation. In the longer term, moreover, a very different climate of historical inquiry from that surrounding the composition of Trevor-Roper's account sustains anxieties over the idea of crystalline truth itself and a definition of “myth” as merely its antonym. It projects a certain de haut en bas throughout the book that no doubt will offend Scots, nationalist or no, but that may also trouble those indifferent to nationalist myth who prefer their history nonetheless to reflect a little less cocksureness about the wisdom of the present.