“The Critic’s Notebook,” by the Editors

“The Critic’s Notebook,” by the Editors

Nonfiction: The Highland Clans, by Alistair Moffat (Thames & Hudson): To Sir Walter Scott, Scotland was the “Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,/ Land of the mountain and the flood.” To his English contemporary Sydney Smith, it was “That knuckle-end of England—that land of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur.” To Robert Louis Stevenson, a native son of Edinburgh, it was simply “indefinable.” And if Scotland is cryptic, how stranger still are the Hig…