The last genuine rebellion on British soil, the Jacobite rising of 1745 forms one of the greatest what ifs' of British history. If Bonnie Prince Charlie's troops had defeated the forces of George II, it is fair to say that the entire subsequent course of the country's history would have been dizzyingly changed.
Jacobitism is a comprehensive study of the Stuart dynasty's attempts to regain the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland in the eighteenth century. It provides not only a history of the Jacobite cause and the Risings but also studies of Jacobite culture, the financing of...

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) had an immense impact throughout Europe. His historical fiction, which brought the ideas of Enlightenment to bear on the novel, created for the first time a sense of the past as a place where people thought, felt and dressed differently. His writing influenced Balzac, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dumas, Pushkin and many others; and Scott's interpretation of history was seized on by Romantic nationalists, particularly in Eastern Europe. This book gives for the first time a comprehensive account of the impact of Scott in Europe, from the early and highly...