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“... 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 ...”

“... the story-book things are there.’ Similar scenes, evocative rather than detailed, abound in Buchan and Brett Young, in Waugh and Wodehouse: their country-house world was ‘mellow, dignified, creeper-clad and bathed in perpetual sunshine’. Significantly, this attitude prevailed at a time when, for the first long period in four centuries, few new ...”

“... of years ago I played a similar game, with a novel which ‘featured’ Milner, Chamberlain, Buchan, Kruger etc, but I was writing a pastiche and felt free to use caricature without apology and without hope of profundity. Foden and Harries boldly push past this and, for entirely serious ends, seek to make real ‘characters’ of many of these same ...”

“... country into Islamic millenarian government in modern times, looks set to be the first out. James Buchan Norfolk Last Tuesday morning, 11 September, I was planning on finishing up an LRB review I was writing – of a book called The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric, by the medievalist Michel Pastoureau. Now, as I stagger numbly round ...”

“... at home in the work of Barthes and of Marx, of Freud and his various students, of T.E. Lawrence, Buchan and other writers of empire, of theorists like Enzensberger, Hegel and Adorno. Such ammunition stands him in good stead when he presents ‘terrorism’, Libya and Cuba as objects created by the US Government and the media (whose role in America is to ...”

“... by highly respectable contributions from the likes of Edmund Gosse, Henry James and even John Buchan. Yet many of the illustrations did shock and even revolt, and Lane was to sack Beardsley when the backwash from the Wilde scandal hit the Bodley Head. ‘Wilde!’ wrote Lambert, in one of his few stylistic lapses. ‘The very name is like a knell, and ...”

“... of fiction, no less than the stories of Kim and Richard Hannay: it is an anti-Kipling, an anti-Buchan fable. No doubt it is by a happy stroke of fantasy that it bears such a marked resemblance to some of the glimpses of American foreign policy that we get from the newspapers. We are in the realm of linguistic games, and no doubt the parallel operations in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... same sculpture (it was ‘the noblest presentment of the human countenance’, according to John Buchan), Beard allows herself a smile in reserve. Under re-examination by 20th-century curators, the bust lost its honoured plinth in the museum. Once hailed as a study done from life, it is now stored away as an 18th-century pastiche. Beard relates many such ...”

“... was firm in his fealty to the English crown and so was replaced by his aunt, Isabel, countess of Buchan. So grave were the repercussions of Isabel’s role in the ceremony that she was pursued by the English and eventually imprisoned in a wooden cage in Berwick Castle. Bruce and his supporters were quickly defeated by English force. With Bruce now a fugitive ...”

“... terrified by everything that went on around him, Morell is the sort of figure every decent John Buchan chap loves to hate. (Mr Irving likens him to Lord Moran, Churchill’s physician – could it be his contempt for the Establishment that explains a comparison as inaccurate as it is insulting?) Morell was as well-informed on most aspects of internal ...”

“... laugh and the man we love to hate, and even the villain of the time-honoured attributes found in Buchan or Sapper or Ian Fleming. These last are by no means despised by Powell’s art, and in Henchman they take the well-known form of extreme loquacity. The main tactic and enjoyment of such a villain is to expound his plans for world conquest or whatever to a ...”

“... himself to be, what feelings are there to rely on? Such questions are skilfully embedded in a Buchan-like adventure thriller. Dougal is chased to the island of Hoy by IRA hitmen. He is the sort of matinée idol who takes along Coleridge’s ...”

“... be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe ...”

“... to their author, and at the same time lacked the constructed persona with which writers like John Buchan managed to endow themselves and their characters. The sense of disembodied animation given off by Mackenzie’s prose was an immediate inspiration to young writers, freeing them into their own literary personalities, but for the reader it has become a ...”