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“... whom Kenner singled out as the most honourable exceptions: Charles Tomlinson, who applauded William Soutar, and Basil Bunting, who befriended MacDiarmid. Yet Tomlinson and Bunting are the true mavericks, as Kenner recognised. They are mavericks because, while acknowledging class-based and region-based resentment, in themselves as in others, they refused ...”

“... Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales though, and most of the ships that sailed to the Arctic from Europe in the 17th century were whalers, heading ever further ...”

“... natives and said vile things about the sainted Aneurin Bevan. Dornford Yates, in short, was John Buchan with big brass knobs on – an ultra-Imperialist and a granite diehard, who seduced the public with his flashy and worthless stories in much the same way as child-molesters tempt eight-year-olds with gaily-coloured sweets. But now comes A.J. Smithers with ...”

“... a blog for the Telegraph of a Treasury aide who’d said to him that ‘Alex Salmond wants to be William Wallace.’ ‘No,’ Martin corrected him. ‘Alex Salmond wants to be Robert the Bruce.’ Wallace has been cast as ‘the people’s champion’, a role he played in the 1975 novel The Wallace by the prolific Nigel Tranter and, twenty years later, in ...”

“... found a recommendation and where the queerness might possibly be stomached. I mean Blackwood.’ William Blackwood and Sons, publishers of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, had been stomaching queerness and Scotchness – and much else besides – for the best part of a century. In the event, they rejected Stevenson’s book, but his instinct had been ...”

“... more precisely of the difference between two moments: the summer of 1915, when the novel by John Buchan on which it’s based began to appear in serial form, in the middle of one world war; and the summer of 1935, when the odds on the imminent outbreak of another were shortening by the day. The film takes from the novel its title, the name of the protagonist ...”

“... understatement intended to convey natural superiority … was modelled on the heroes of John Buchan: decent, anti-intellectual, self-deprecating and eternally stiff of upper lip’. Sometimes, the officer in Russia actually was one of Buchan’s or Rudyard Kipling’s heroes: Brigadier-General Ironside, earlier ...”

“... impersonator. Indeed, Empson’s speculations about sex sometimes seem to owe more to Sapper or Buchan than they do to Freud. D.H. Lawrence is reproved for squeamishly supposing that Lady Ottoline’s cervix was sharp enough to lacerate him. ‘Now, if this had been physically true, any man capable of blowing his own nose and fond of the woman could have ...”

“... to know which peril to invoke, which would pay off best. In 1893 the prolific literary adventurer, William le Queux (sometime Honorary Consul for San Marino), published The Great War England in 1897, in which a Franco-Russian army invaded Britain, and followed it in 1905 with The Invasion of 1910, this time with jack-booted Prussians as the aggressors. This ...”

“... Sinner (1824). (This canard is still current: in his survey of Enlightenment Edinburgh, James Buchan describes the Confessions as ‘attributed to Hogg’.*) And Hogg’s editors, in his own time and since, have felt free to ‘improve’ his works by excising indelicacies, so that he has come down to us in editions that are botched and mangled. Censured ...”

“... has been wholly unhonoured in these 72 years. The critical acclaim, led by Bennett, Galsworthy, Buchan and Conrad, which greeted the original appearance of A Poor Man’s House was succeeded by decades when the book was out of print, but it has been consistently praised and recommended by Professor W.G. Hoskins in the successive editions of his classic work ...”

“... For Scotland, there has been work of major significance in the past decade by, for example, William Donaldson, Murray Pittock, Robert Crawford and Andrew Noble. More general studies of emergent nationalism must be relevant to Burns. For while he may not have been a consistent Jacobite or even what in British terms passed for a Jacobin, his attitude to ...”

“... In recent years there has been a conservative revival, apparent in the reappearance of John Buchan on the shelves, or the clean-cut manly values of Chariots of Fire. Churchill is modish again, and all the more so after the Falklands. Those who followed Southern Television’s series about the Churchill of the 1930s will recognise the extent to which it ...”

“... entertaining’, but this is ambiguous: he may have meant that Russell was a figure of fun, like William Boot. When Russell died in 1947 he was described in the Times as ‘that most endearing of Somerset farmers’ – the best tribute they could come up with. Russell was ever a countryman, proud of his mangels: raised in rural Surrey, he was discomposed in ...”

“... War. There were Kipling’s vivid stories of Sussex life through the ages, and then there was John Buchan’s The Path of the King, tracing ancestral virtues and vices from a Viking prince to Abraham Lincoln, taking in the depravities of Titus Oates. Even before reading these quite gripping books, we were vaguely acquainted, through schools, comics and ...”