Colin Kidd

At the time of the devolution referendum of 1997, doom-mongers feared that the Scots were about to join ‘a motorway without exits’. Separation from England seemed inevitable in the long run. En route, Scottish politics would be hampered by a systemic instability. After all, the anti-devolutionists whined, the Nationalists needed to win only once in Scottish parliamentary elections...

Their resolve fortified by the sturdy civic virtue of Cato and Brutus, and their idea of republican self-government indebted to Greco-Roman models, the founders of American independence deferred to the authority of the ancients, even as they embarked on a revolutionary political experiment. George Washington, for example, identified himself with Cato of Utica, whom the 18th-century British...

Since the ‘stolen’ election of 2000 the Republican Party has set out its values with a starkness not revealed even during the despised regimes of Nixon and Reagan. This has yielded a rich seam of material for satirical film-makers, caricaturists and polemicists, though at some cost for dispassionate analysis of the political scene. Cartoonish simplicities abound. The electoral...

Globalisation presents formidable challenges for history, a discipline which is congenitally nationalist. The academic study of the past emerged during the 19th century in tandem with the rise of European nationalisms, and remains coloured by its origins. This sinister twinship wasn’t acknowledged, however, until in recent decades historians began to confront their subject’s...

“Relocating the Puritan ancestors from folksy Thanksgiving remembrance to a place of honour (or dishonour) as the principal begetters of the American way of doing politics, [Morone] proposes that Puritan ideals loom large behind the ‘zero-tolerance’ version of liberalism. The Puritans first conjured up the notion of America as a redeemer nation with a sacred mission, popularised the jeremiad – a sermon of complaint against backsliding and declension – which would become in time ‘a kind of American anthem’, and set precedents for the harsh treatment of demonic otherness.”