Every year since the 1950s, on the anniversary of his death in 1715, the memory of Andrew Fletcher has been commemorated in Saltoun Kirkyard, where he is buried. Paul Scott, now in his ninth decade but looking like emulating Roland Muirhead as the Mr Standfast of nationalism, has edited a selection of these. Though a distinctly mixed bag, they provide the materials of a stimulating debate on the content and context of patriotism. Fletcher himself, learned, incorruptible, choleric, was never an easy character. He wrecked the Monmouth rebellion of 1685 by pistolling its main West County sponsor, fortuitously saving his own skin. His thoughtful anti-Union polemic, with its fine limpid prose, detonated prematurely. Thereafter he was burnt out, and with his passing, a secular Scotland-centred political philosophy slumbered until our own day, with only a few sporadic attempts through the likes of J. F. Ferrier, J, H. Lorimer and Lord Cooper to reawaken it. In this sense the contributors recorded here are resurrection men, animated by the challenge to Scots identity offered by Margaret Thatcher's primitive reading of those Scots philosophers who came after Fletcher, and saw the country's future as at best a 'local or provincial government* within a British political uni t