Explore Scotland's Rich History from its Earliest Times

Muriel Watt: It was very confusing. It kept going back and forth all the time, so you never new what year you were in.

Canada on Apr 03, 2023

David: The author has started from Scotland’s earliest beginnings, and writes intelligently and concisely.
It is not simply a boring “history book.”
I keep a list with me as I read it, so I can write down new words as I go along - it helps expand one’s vocabulary too

United States on Mar 02, 2023

Judy Nash: This well researched history is written in a lively, captivating way. I couldn't stop reading the over 750 pages!

Canada on Nov 19, 2022

T.R.: It is semi-comprehensive, focusing on specific battles and people who were turning points. A lot of time is spent discussing the terrain, geologic history, and particular locations. Without ANY maps though, it is virtually impossible to make sense of it because the author mentions myriad places and seems to assume the reader knows where they are. I found this really frustrating. Also, the narration is more or less chronological but follows one topic or area for a number of years and then jumps to another topic and goes back in time again. It feels like a 2 steps forward, one step back approach to narration. This coupled with the lack of any maps made it confusing and frustrating. There are some b&w pictures of various geologic features and other places, but these could have all been replaced by maps and the book would have been much better. Finally, this type of history that attempts to tell a people's story from the time before there were any humans at all up to the present is always problematic. Unless it runs into multiple volumes, the author is forced to omit a whole of information. All in all, I'm still looking for a good read on Scotland's history.

United States on Aug 04, 2022

Linda: I posted this to friends in USA Alwats track and sign for parcels to USA. All mind arrived so far

United Kingdom on Jun 25, 2022

Amazon Customer: Excellent book, well written and factual. The pictures were a bonus however it would have been nice if he'd added a map of medieval and mid ages Scotland as references. Otherwise very good book.

Canada on Apr 09, 2022

noidletalk: By no means the best or the worst of such works but in places very interesting and throughout based on ordinary people as far as possible.

United Kingdom on Feb 23, 2022

Sotto voce: Alistair Moffat is such an entertaining historian that when I feel like reading the tales of 'north sea people', Moffat's a sure bet. And that's how I got into this Moffat installment.

Moffat's style is up close and he has the gift of writing to his reader. His audience should have a reasonable grasp of history to begin to imagine the whole. Scottish history largely occurs with not a peep out of the 99% that lived the tale. The Picts didn't write. The weather destroys paper. Most of the story is tinged through the eyes of monks paid to write glorious stories about patrons desiring heaven to hell at the end of the day.

Basically, life was rotten. Your ancestors alternated between free and slave depending on the unending wars. The food was horrible. If you got sick or minor injured, odds were good that you were gonna die miserably. You spent the winter in a state of smoke induced hypoxia as chimneys hadn't been invented. And everybody smelled bad. The only good news on the BO front was that you smelled as bad as everyone else and maybe nature canceled out the nasty smell and you maybe didn't notice it. The ancestors must have smelled so bad that modern language must...

United States on Oct 17, 2021

Dora A. Smith: This is an extremely good, detailed, history of Scotland. It's by far the best history of Scotland I've encountered so far. I never knew Alistair Moffat could write like this. In fact, the consensus of reviews of his books as a whole seems to be he's a genuine veritable historian when he wants to be. However I'm more used to Alistair Moffat as one of a small group of wannabe English academic genetic genealogists blithly reciting mythology and telling people mythological history of for isntance their Y DNA, in blatant complete contradiction to the facts.

Moffat starts out with his usual poetic myth history of Scotland from which one can occasionally extract an occasional fact, that might be factual and might not. But at the point of the Norman Conquest, he abruptly begins to write history.

From this point he thoroughly covers the development of every Scottish institution. HIs covering of the clans could be more detailed, but one gets a clear idea that their origin is multi-ethnic and lies in the feudal mess of Scotland under the Normans. However the clans continued to evolve up to the Reformation.

He covers how the Scottish peasantry lived. He covers the...

United States on Aug 15, 2021

Justin M. Nicholson: This is a well-written history, and is probably about the best that can be done in one volume. The author is a well-known and much-published Scottish historian. Three of my four grandparents were of Scottish heritage, and I have a fair knowledge of Scottish history. I have read other of this author's works, but this appears to be his magnus opus. The Earliest Times of the title are the pre-pre-history, and that chapter was a bit tedious for me, being mainly about geology and topography. Most of Scottish history is fairly lineal, and once the Celtic people arrive, the narrative flows along smoothly from ancient to medieval to early modern. The post-World War II section, on the other hand, is mostly a presentation of the author's political opinions, including a gratuitous and completely irrelevant attack on Donald Trump. The body of the book is worth five stars, but it loses one for the beginning and the end.

United States on Jun 26, 2021