Rosalind Mitchison

Rosalind Mitchison a professor of social history at the University of Edinburgh, is the author of A History of Scotland and editor of The Roots of Nationalism. Union of the Crowns and Union of the Kingdoms is to be published later this year by Edward Arnold.

Letter

Counterfactual History

13 February 1992

Counterfactual history repels many historians because of the difficulty of knowing enough about all aspects of a period for the counter-factual proposal to be, as your reviewer Charles Maier says, ‘capable of insertion into the real past’. What we know about the past is constantly changing as research invalidates older views. Maier’s review of 13 February reveals that for certain periods either...
Letter

Making and breaking

21 December 1989

Rosalind Mitchison writes: There seems to be a gulf between the concepts of an author’s obligation to his or her readers as held by Frank Honigsbaum and myself. But, as his letter shows, he can write clearly when he is annoyed, so there is always hope of bridging the gulf.
Letter

Facts and Folk

5 January 1989

David Craig has taken time off in reviewing (LRB, 5 January) John Prebble’s The King’s Jaunt on the visit of George IV to Scotland in 1822 to register indignation that I should have written of the Napier Report of 1884 that it needs to be handled with care and detachment. What I wrote was that two Royal Commission Reports need such an approach, the 1835 Municipal Corporations Report and the Napier...
Letter

Simplicity Smith

6 March 1980

SIR: D.D. Raphael, who has sent you a powerful criticism of my review of Professor Skinner’s papers (Letters, 17 April), certainly knows Adam Smith better than I do, and I bow to his main lines of attack. However, if he would accept that I am amazed whenever I use The Wealth of Nations at the subtlety and depth of its perceptions he might still accept that the points I made were not totally frivolous....

Joining them

Conrad Russell, 24 January 1985

Goodwin Wharton is a fascinating and amusing figure, but he is sui generis: the same things which make his flirtations with the occult such amusing reading also make it difficult to compare his...

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