Georg Lukacs, Hungarian Marxist philosopher, enthused in his “The Historical Novel”, and it was to become the standard work on the subject, that Sir Walter Scott managed despite his inordinately reactionary, pro-aristocratic stance to write progressive literature. Lukacs claimed that Scott developed “typical’ characters in his novels, and these characters dramatized major social conflicts, highlighting the flux of transformation – the moment in ‘time’, in history – rather than depicting stasis. Lukacs championed such novels over what was for him the aberrant experimentation of a Franz Kafka or a James Joyce – formal innovation changed nothing, he opined. If he saw how Sir Walter Scott’s heritage is being used by a campaign for formal innovation called ‘independence’ and described in the words of “a day when we can decide our future” uttered by Alex Salmond.