This year’s Literature Festival, organised by West Dunbartonshire Libraries, got off to a cracking start with the Alastair Pearson Memorial Lecture at Gartocharn’s Millennium Hall on Monday [11th may]. The lecture was delivered by Tom Devine, the world-renowned Scottish historian and Professor of History at Edinburgh University.

In front of an audience of over 100, and against a magnificently sun-drenched background of Loch Lomond landscape, Professor Devine gave a dynamic and intense talk on the what he termed the “death” and re-invention of Scotland. Scotland’s identity seemed to the the late 18th and early 19th-century unionist-minded intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment to be on the verge of disappearing into “North Britain”; yet new markers of national identity took shape: tartan, once vilified, became “cool”, Burns’ Clubs sprouted, tapping into the nostalgia for a rural past; The Highlands became a powerful and inviting Scottish tourist symbol rather than a fearsome environment to be avoided.

Allied to all this, was the huge involvement that Scots had in the expansion of the British Empire. Far from losing identity in this British project, they carved their Scottishnesss into large communities in far-flung places like Canada and Australia through settlement and administration.

Then there was stubborn resistance of ordinary Scottish men and women throughout the 20th century to Anglicised assimilation, surviving two world wars and coming to positive fruition in the devolved Scottish Parliament that we have today.

That is only a brief summary of a fine, learned address. What a great opener for the festival!