by HUGH TREVOR-ROPER , Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. A talk first broadcast on 15 August on the occasion of the bicentenary of Scott's birth.
It may seem odd that a novelist should be credited with a historical revolution, but those who have re-directed the course of history have almost all been non-historians or, at most. amateur historians: Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Herder, Hegel. Marx. And Sir Walter Scott was a historical innovator in this sense.
(Scott and Music: tomorrow.
8.30 pm. Radio 4) followed by an interlude