Rab Houston is professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews. He has published a dozen books on Scottish, English and European social history, including Autism in History and Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Culture and Education, 1500-1800. His Scotland: A Very Short Introduction is published by Oxford University Press.

Mark Thwaite: What made you want to write a Very Short Introduction to Scotland Rab?

Rab Houston: Scotland now is at a watershed. The experience of political devolution since 1999 has gone hand in hand with dramatic changes in Scottish society since c.1980. Union with England has ceased to be a constitutional fixture and become a constitutional option. The demographic, religious and social structures that underpinned life for half a millennium have been altered so radically that Scotland is almost a new country. Yet at the same time Scots are their history: for centuries completely independent and only more recently part of the United Kingdom. The experience of being Scottish and British creates a tension in our lives that all Scots feel, but not all understand. I wanted to explain it and to explore the influence of history on the making of modern Scotland. Scotland is fascinating in itself. But it also offers an example of a successful diffusion of political power: an issue confronted by nation states across Europe and the world. When I lecture abroad (most recently in Japan and the US) I find people sympathetic towards Scotland, but aware that they don’t know as much as they would like to about its people and its history. So I tried to write a book that could be accessible to anyone interested in Scotland, not just academics, university students and secondary school pupils, but also visitors here for work or leisure as well as Scottish expatriates around the world.

MT: How long did it take you to write and research your book Rab?

RH: About a year. Because I have worked in Scottish (and English) history for 30 years I already knew a lot of the literature, but there were many areas that I was only dimly aware of like the early church and local government in the modern era. A year is very short for an academic monograph and I'd normally expect to take between three and five years on a book, though it could be up to four times the length of this Very Short Introduction to Scotland.

MT: How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing?

RH: I compose at the keyboard. Words come easily to me, but my first drafts always need lots of revision and I write iteratively, moving around blocks of text and rephrasing. That means I go through multiple versions before I reach a text with which I'm reasonably happy. Then I try to leave it alone for as long as I can -- usually when a draft is with the publisher's readers -- before doing the final version.

MT: Do you enjoy the research or are you always itching to get down to the actual writing?

RH: I love both and I count it an extraordinary privilege to be able to work at my hobby. Research brings the thrill of discovery; writing the challenge of making it all cohere into what is hopefully a lucid and clear way. For the sort of writing I do I find it best to hold off writing until I have a clear idea of the main arguments I want to put forward in each section. The later I leave my first draft the less re-writing I have to do.

MT: What was the most interesting/unusual/unexpected fact you learned about Scotland in the course of your research?

RH: Two things. First, despite appearances Scotland really was and is nothing like England. The experience of Union with England since 1707 has made Scots think of themselves as British, but this never overlaid their pride in the many things that made them different. Second, how incredibly varied such a small country is locally and regionally: you can see that with accents, but also with churchgoing, holidays, festivals and even architecture.

MT: What was the most difficult aspect of writing your book? How did you overcome it?

RH: My publisher gave me a word limit that is shorter than a short novel. In that space I had to explain Scotland’s past and how it has shaped her present at a critical stage in her history. I think that a nation is its history and I had to cover everything from economics to environment, law to language, population to poetry, and socialism to sectarianism. To overcome the problem of space I had to leave a lot out, but to give the book coherence and spirit I let some of myself come out in it -- something academics are warned never to do! So most of the time I try to be balanced and fair about things like the Highland clearances of population or the legacy of distrust, double-dealing, broken promises, and betrayal that continues to invigorate relations between Scotland and England today. But there are other times when I just have to tell it as I see it. Those are the bits I enjoyed writing most.

MT: What do you hope your book will achieve Rab?

RH: My aim is to help Scots understand themselves in time and to make it easier for those interested in Scotland to see what makes its people tick. In particular I’d like Scots to be more aware of their public past. To be alive is to be touched by history and few nations feel that touch more than Scotland. Yet our vision of our history is dominated by battles and kings and queens. For me, the way Scots are now is also shaped by institutions that are fascinating in their own right, including a distinctive legal system, a national church and a separate educational system.

I'd also like the rest of the world to understand Scotland for what it is: a part of Britain, but also a distinct nation rather than just a backward version of England waiting to catch up.

MT: What is your own favourite book of Scottish history?

RH: For fiction it has to be Scott's Heart of Midlothian. It tells us an enormous amount in strikingly vivid terms about life in historic Scotland and it is a rattling good read. Smout's History of the Scottish People is probably the most important scholarly work of the past two generations in making de-mythologised Scottish history popular with general readers and a part of the academic mainstream.

MT: What are your reading right now?

RH: For pleasure Arnaldur Indridason's Silence of the Grave. One of my Ph.D. students who just got his degree came over from Iceland to study with me. He introduced me to the Scandinavian crime writers (in translation!) I find it fascinating how writers from the northern fringes of Europe do the dark side of people and places so well: from Robert Louis Stevenson to Ian Rankin and of course the Swede Henning Mankell. Indridason's book is an outstanding crime novel, but it deals with some deeply painful social issues in ways that made me weep. In my academic work I seldom get time to read a book from cover to cover unless I am reviewing it. With such a volume of scholarly literature appearing there sadly isn’t the time.

MT: What do you do when you are not writing?

RH: My wife and I travel as often as we can both in Scotland and overseas. For myself, I take a lot of exercise to keep my mind sharp: swimming, yoga and Tai Chi, which is not really a martial art so much as a sort of active meditation. I like working with my hands so I do the cooking (my wife has a demanding job as a university manager, so it suits us both) and I enjoy furniture restoration and upholstery. My passion is scuba diving, both off Scotland and around the world, because it is so blissfully absorbing.

MT: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

RH: For a book like this it is someone who is curious. To be more specific I guess there are two groups, with a representative sitting on each shoulder as I wrote... One is people from England, Wales and Ireland who find the Scots a bit of a puzzle and want to "understand the neighbours" -- as Jeremy Paxman put it in a very generous review of one of my earlier books. The other is those of Scottish descent: at a conservative estimate there are 20 million people around the globe who have Scottish ancestry, most of them living in Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand. I’ve even seen a figure as high as 50 million. And then standing behind me there were the Scots themselves looking for background to researching their family tree or maybe trying to understand why Scottish devolution has worked so well.

MT: What are you working on now Rab?

RH: I have two academic topics that interest me. One is about the history of suicide in Britain from the end of the Middle Ages to the start of the Victorian era. Cheerful stuff you might say, but utterly fascinating. Suicide was treated as a crime and the way survivors dealt with it gives us all sorts of insights in religion, medicine and punishment. In England some suicides were buried with a stake through them; in Scotland some were dragged through the streets and hung on gibbets. This is unthinkable to us, so there must be a way into a completely different mind set here. I work best when I have more than one project underway because I can always shift topics if I get stale on one. So my other topic is something quite different: begging letters or petitions from tenants to their landlords in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As with all my work I want this to be truly British and Irish, with data from all parts of the Atlantic archipelago. I hope it will tell me what social relationships were like: which was the most oppressed peasantry in Britain and Ireland? After that, who knows? The books I did on mental disability in history still live with me because I feel there is much more to learn from the way "normal" people responded to those who they thought abnormal. Finally, I also do some journalism and I found writing theVery Short Introduction to Scotland so enjoyable that I'd like to do more books for general readers.

MT: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

RH: I'm lost in admiration for Martin Amis. His use of language is so strikingly original and he has continually expanded the scope of what the novel can do. Ian McEwan comes a close second for the intensity of his prose. His early short stories are beautifully crafted and Atonement is a near-perfect novel.

MT: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer!?

RH: Read as many different literary styles as you can and see what they have to offer. That means tabloids as well as broadsheets, romance as well as thrillers, magazines as well as books. People tell me my prose is exceptionally clear and readable by the standards of most academics. I attribute that to having done Latin A-level at school, but you can also study it in evening classes now. Classical culture underlies much of modern literate media and understanding its rules has helped me to develop my style.

MT: Anything else you would like to say?

RH: When I told one of my friends I had been asked to do this for the Book Depository he said: "Wow Rab: you get to play some great gigs." He was right: thanks for the opportunity!