Andrew Marr's Great Scots: The Writers Who Shaped a Nation

Andrew Marr looks at James Boswell, a man torn between his patriotic duty at home and his desire for fame and adventure elsewhere; it is his colorful life and work that captures so vividly the uneasy relationship between England and Scotland.

Andrew Marr examines the life of Walter Scott, a prolific novelist and poet who wrote swashbuckling tales of romance and derring-do, which sold by the bucket load, both north and south of the border.

Andrew Marr looks into the life of Scotland's most bothersome poet, Hugh MacDiarmid - who reinvented Scots as a language for serious writing, tried to create an independent Scottish Communist utopia, and was for many years under surveillance by MI5.