1. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Sur la traduction (Paris: Bayard, 2004), 23–4, 43–4
2. also Franz Rosenzweig, “The Impossibility and Necessity of Translation,” in Translating Literature: The German Tradition, ed. André Lefevere (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1977), 110–12.
3. A full-scale modern biography is still missing. As other Scottish literati, Robertson received his due from Dugald Stewart, Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith, L.L.D., of William Robertson, D.D, and of Thomas Reid, D.D. (Edinburgh: George Ramsay, 1811).
4. Robertson as the life and soul of the Moderate Party has been discussed by Jeremy J. Carter, “The Making of Principal Robertson in 1762: Politics and the University of Edinburgh in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Scottish Historical Review 49 (1) (1970): 60–84
5. and Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).