"'This excellent book triumphs in the face of some notable challenges . . . Murray Pittock . . . successfully manages to pull together and consolidate primary and secondary literature that is spread across a wide variety of disciplines to create what he terms a 'unified field of enquiry'. . . [which] incorporates the work of historians, art historians, architectural historians, literary scholars, antiquarians, collectors and amateur historians into a rigorous and comprehensible whole. . . It will be the authoritative text on the topic for many years to come . . .That it adds so much to the significance of material culture and its omnipresence in every aspect of political and social discourse adds immeasurably to its value and the range of disciplines that can gain insight from its fascinating content". - Robin Nicolson, Eighteenth-Century Scotland

'...a fascinating collection of material evidence, from trick goblets to plantations of certain kinds of trees; from the architectural layout of manor houses to reconstructed accounts of rituals, codes,and cant words. Pittock has a brilliant eye for detail, as is necessary when dealing with a subject that can reveal itself even in the way one drinks a glass of wine... a rich and varied trove of evidence.' Elias Grieg, BARS Review