The making of modern Scotland: politics, society and the sociology of a stateless nation: David McCrone, Changing Scotland: Society, Politics and Identity, Edinburgh University Press, 2025, £19.99.

A clear head is needed for these turbulent times. Long assumed to be immune to the upheavals and misrule reigning elsewhere Scotland may not be so different after all. A sense of historical perspective is needed to address the well-founded illusions of Scottish exceptionalism. It is David McCrone’s contention in Changing Scotland that the nation was changed irrevocably in the final three decades of the twentieth century. This is grounded by McCrone in what the radical American sociologist C. Wright Mills famously called ‘the sociological imagination’. For Mills the biography of individuals can only be grasped in relation to wider historical changes in social structure which may or may not be readily apparent to people going about their everyday lives.