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“... Manchu continued to come out all through the war, though they were rather eclipsed in 1916 by John Buchan’s Greenmantle, in which Richard Hannay bluffed his way to Constantinople to prevent a wild Islamic prophet, backed by Germany, from setting the East in flames. In the real world the Germans were backing a more potent troublemaker by smuggling Lenin to St ...”

“... impishly rhetorical. Germans were commonly assumed to be sexual perverts, like the villain of John Buchan’s Greenmantle, the ‘huge, brutal’ Ulrich von Stumm with his ‘perverted taste for soft delicate things’. ‘Do you speak German?’ was among the most familiar graffiti in the public conveniences of Paris. Signs of Teutonic deviation at home had ...”

“... novelist worth catching up on and following, in the wake of and on a level with the likes of James Buchan, Tessa Hadley and Edward St Aubyn. The four books are distinct – there’s no real overlap to speak of – but possess the sort of shared traits that a reader likes to find in an author, and an author in himself. London and the South-East is a story of a ...”

“... a personal ‘demon’, and the mild fascination with the occult shared by Pliny the Elder, John Buchan, and generations of ghost-story enthusiasts and horror-movie buffs? Pascal Boyer tells us in his opening chapter that ‘religion is about the existence and causal powers of non-observable entities and agencies.’ He doesn’t appear to have in mind ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that it was more of an adventure story, he was then constantly interrupted with allusions to John Buchan, a comparison just inexact enough to annoy Priestley without being obviously amiss. Wheldon, I wrote in my television column the following week, had a genius for getting things narrowly wrong. The tree he barked up was always the tree that stood next to ...”

“... he would have seen a writer of rattling good yarns, and a gentleman to boot, in the person of John Buchan appointed Governor-General of Canada, a height to which the creator of She would hardly have dared to ...”

“... or tenant farmer, of the Mearns is the ‘essential Scot’. In this he differs from Scott and Buchan, who took the essential Scot to be the Border reiver. Similarly, Gibbon’s paganism distinguishes him from Barrie’s cosily Presbyterian Thrums, a town based on the neighbouring Kirriemuir. The Diffusionist thesis held that modern civilisation represents ...”

“... attractive, formidable people in Nigerian writing (and indeed in tales by Rider Haggard and John Buchan), but books from white-settler territory, by such authors as Athol Fugard or J.M. Coetzee, seem to present them as permanently morose, deformed in body and soul, to be pitied from a great height. I exaggerate, but Donald Bloch’s morbid novel supports my ...”

“... autobiography which begins with an encounter in an Italian railway carriage almost worthy of Buchan himself. ‘A breathless young Englishman’ flops into the dining-car seat opposite the author and reveals himself as Oliver Myers, an Egyptologist with a genuine belief in the ghouls and djinns of the Arabian desert. Next we encounter, in the most casual ...”

“... floated their dreamlands far down the Danube and into the ‘bloodthirsty’ Balkans. Later, John Buchan, Lawrence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Bradbury were among those who tried their hand at brutal, gaudy Balkan Ruritanias. Literary ‘othering’, as teachers tell their classes, is a way of confirming your own society as ‘normal’ by heightening ...”

“... There was, it seems, no other way to imagine this desire to carry on against all odds. John Buchan stage-managed Howard-Bury’s 15 reports for the Times from the 1921 expedition and made them as popular ‘as a serial novel by Dickens’. Mallory and others returned to undertake a gruelling series of public lectures, all of which were supposed to be ...”

“... out in the bookies’ toilet. And he was delightful at it, smirking and giggling in his Wattie Buchan T-shirt, like the total amateur he was. He’s back as Forrester again in the sequel, fencing stolen goods from one of the many underworldly lockups and basement storage areas necessitated by the plot. ‘Learning the trade, eh, son?’ he says in a wavery ...”

“... of how far the freedom of the word has been eroded in Glasnost in Britain?, edited by Norman Buchan and Tricia Sumner.* Though the editors are close to the Labour Party and might therefore be thought to have an axe to grind, their accounts are balanced and factual. Contributors include the Conservative MP Richard Shepherd, whose alternative Protection of ...”

“... My own local paper in Aberdeen, just forty years ago, reported sermons preached by ministers in Buchan against the wickedness that had brought down the wrath of God in thunderstorms and devastated the oats and the barley. The dazed and sickened impression I took away from all those murals and altar-pieces in Florence was that human beings have spent large ...”