<p>War opened and closed Scotland's greatest century: a pitiless part in the defeat of Naploeon in 1815, a huge blood-sacrifice for the sake of victory from 1914. In between came the greatest contributions to the progress and happiness of the rest of mankind that the Scots have ever made - in everything from the combine harvester to the mackintosh to anaesthesia. It was a supremely successful achieving society yet one not without deep flaws, in its urban poverty, its destruction of the environment, its religious intolerance, its moral hypocrisy, its crushing of Highland culture.</p> <p>Michael Fry shows, with an emphasis always on the human story, how a succession of deep crises undermined the usually tranquil and prosperous surface of life in Victorian Scotland to leave a legacy of paradox that the modern nation has even today yet to overcome.</p>
