HUGH TREVOR-ROPER , RegiUS PrOfessor of Modern History in the University of Oxford, talks about Scott and history on the occasion of the bicentenary of his birth.
It may seem odd that a novelist should be credited with a historical revolution, but those who have redirected 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.