The SNP is destroying Scotland’s reputation

Sometimes you need to get away from your country in order to view it more clearly. There’s a passage in Amor Towles’s charming novel A Gentleman in Moscow, when the Russian aristocrat Count Rostov, who has been under house arrest in the city’s Metropol Hotel since the Bolshevik revolution, begins to see Russia in an entirely new light. He has been listening to his oldest friend, Mishka, who has returned from exile in Siberia, where he has been a prisoner in the gulag, and has witnessed the horrors of Stalin’s repression. Russia, says Mishka, has a propensity towards self-harm: it turns in on itself, and every now and then it tears itself apart. “As a people,” he says, “we Russians have proven unusually adept