The Thistle and the Rose: six centuries of love and hate between the Scots and the English Allan Massie John Murray, 326pp, £20 ISBN 0719559995

At Robin Cook's funeral in Edinburgh last month, Richard Holloway, the former bishop of Edinburgh, told the congregation at St Giles's Cathedral that it might appear strange to be holding a religious service for an atheist. "But Robin," he said, "was a Presbyterian atheist." Brought up, as Cook had been, against the backcloth of Scottish teaching, the Scottish kirk and Scottish history, it was inevitable that he should carry the DNA of Scotland's religion.

Cook would probably have agreed. He might even have concurred with the view, expressed by a character in one of Allan Massie's finest novels, Shadows of Empire, that the Scots are moved by "the magnetic attraction of an Idea". However practical a race they have been in the past, they have always warmed to a "madness of theology and disputation concerning matters that no Englishman would give the time of day to considering".

Massie plays on this theme throughout a book that ranges over 600 years of Scottish-English history, bringing to it a depth of knowledge and an affectionate insight that few other writers of his gen-eration could match. Because he is an adopted Borderer, and a long-time critic of devolution, he brings a healthy scep-ticism to some of the more self-serving of Scottish myths - whether misty-eyed Jacobitism, Covenanting zeal or deep-seated Anglophobia. All this makes his conclusion about the state of Scottish-English relations striking. Far from conceding that Scotland has played the junior partner in its long relationship with its powerful neighbour, he declares that, "in certain respects, modern England may be held to be a Scottish creation".

Massie's thesis goes back to the origins of the nation. Because, unlike Ireland or Wales, Scotland resisted colonisation, fought off successive invasions, forged relations with France in particular and continental Europe in general, and developed its own legal and educational systems, which were in many respects superior to the Anglo-Saxon models, the Scots had no cause to feel inferior to the English, nor to experience the deep-seated hatred that influenced the Irish. Resentment of English superiority, yes; irritation at its condescension, frequently. But deep-seated loathing - certainly not.

The Scots have usually known on which side their bread was buttered. From the marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor in 1503, through the union of the crowns under James VI, and on to the political accord of 1707 and the flourishing of trade that followed, Scotland, against the run of things, seems often to have got the best of the bargain. Massie shares his hero Walter Scott's view that the Union was a "wise scheme", from which Scotland greatly benefited. Thereafter it exported south a disproportion- ate weight of ideas and influence which, arguably, continues to this day in the higher reaches of government.

There are chapters here on how Scott, apart from telling the Scottish people about their own past, reinvented the myth of "Merrie England"; on the philosopher David Hume's history of England, and his definition of state authority and civil liberties; on Robert Louis Stevenson's influence on modern English literature; and the forming of English history by two very different Scots: Macaulay and Carlyle. In between are entertaining diversions on Boswell and Johnson, John Buchan and Compton Mackenzie - and the monarchy. Queen Victoria, Massie maintains, helped boost the economy of the Highlands by inventing "Balmorality", thus encouraging modern tourism, as well as demonstrating the contribution that big estates can make to employment in remote areas. (This is a view so provocative in modern Scotland that land reformers will doubtless burn the book.)

Massie is an unapologetic Unionist, convinced that both countries have benefited from the effect of joining forces. He is less impressed by what has happened in the six years since Scotland acquired its own parliament. "The Scots, led by the lacklustre and defensively minded Labour Party, opted for the halfway house of devolution, semi-detached but eschewing the risks and opportunities of independence," he writes. "Far from opening the way to a 'new Scotland', devolution, representing a retreat from whole-hearted participation in the United Kingdom, may be seen as an example of the 'Scottish cringe' in action."

Here I have to dissent. Indeed, I think Massie misses an important aspect of devolution - one that, in some ways, supports his general thesis that Scotland's relationship with England has ultimately benefited both nations. Because Scottish politics is now debated at Holyrood rather than Westminster, anti-Englishness has declined markedly. Scottish voters, never short of complaint, blame Scottish ministers rather than their UK counterparts when things go wrong. It does not mean any diminution of Scottish resentment or Scottish irritation: it just means that it is kept north of the border rather than exported south. That, I would contend, is progress.

Magnus Linklater is a columnist on the Times

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