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“... said a poet. ‘Destroying all those beautiful things?’ It would be exciting, like a John Buchan romance, if the Rais of Iraq were to revive the worship of those ancient, aphrodisiac deities. It was good to meet the Governor of Babylon, successor to the prophet Daniel (whose shrine is in Kirkuk, next to Hosea’s), to feast in the open air watching ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... horrible possibility seem more likely. He has a talent for narrative, making good use (like John Buchan) of his knowledge of Scotland as well as of London power-centres: if the Russians were to land a task force in Shetland, he persuades us, this is how they would do it and this is how the police force would react. He has an ironic wit and a good ear for ...”

“... Lloyd George and Churchill all came, as did some leading literary figures, Kipling, Barrie and Buchan, none of whom was liked by their hosts, as well as Lytton Strachey and Hilaire Belloc, who were more popular. Royalty also figured: the occasional Austrian archduke, the Queen of Romania, Queen Victoria’s third son, the Duke of Connaught, and less ...”

“... Conservatives were similarly opposed to doctrine and ideology. To choose just two examples, John Buchan, like Disraeli a novelist and Conservative MP, maintained in the 1920s that Conservatism was ‘above all things a spirit not an abstract doctrine’. And ten years later, Stanley Baldwin warned a Canadian audience not to change the basis of their ...”

“... of the literary establishment. Northern Numbers included work by established names like John Buchan, as well as by newcomers like Grieve and his brother Andrew, whose verse (as Bold points out) Grieve later viciously attacked. Eventually, Andrew would break permanently with Christopher, describing him (with some justice) as ‘megalomaniac’. By ...”

“... it’s not sufficiently idiosyncratic or flamboyant to take off properly. The blurb mentions Buchan and Rider Haggard, but a more insistent comparison soon comes to mind: Nancy Drew. At one point Hannie’s on the trail of a missing will – as eager as any girl detective to set things right – skullduggery having endangered the claim to a Caribbean ...”

“... alternative to becoming a black sheep’, which sounds a bit too much like the kind of observation Buchan’s characters used to make. Fleming, less Buchan than buccaneer, had broken any number of hearts and had any number of rich and wonderful mistresses in the time Ann had known him; and she was always conscious that an ...”

“... written for children, or been such as they can enjoy – from Kipling and Grahame and Doyle and Buchan to Tolkien and White. Imagination has flinched from the adult reality of British decline, so that one sees even Orwell struggling with one foot in the Georgian swamp. Ransome (like Edward Thomas) deserves credit for getting beyond sentimentality. Perhaps ...”

“... About most of the writers he meets he is catty, possibly jealous. He says of his old friend, John Buchan: ‘Of course he wasn’t in the same street as Raymond ... When I talk of him with any of our old friends of Oxford days I find we think him slightly ridiculous ... His stories were (for me) simply unreadable.’ He asked J.M. Barrie, ‘in a mad fit of ...”

“... with origins as humble as his own. He took the advice of the idiosyncratic radical 11th Earl of Buchan, to travel the country, thus greatly expanding his sense of what his nation was. He could have, probably would have, written more poems as good as ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, the way he would naturally have continued – that is, the way of comedy. Because the ...”

“... profile of the Blackwood’s list, one which downplays the firm’s literary ‘stars’ (Conrad, Buchan, Forster and so on), to emphasise instead a range of forgotten but lucrative works of non-fiction – the military histories, textbooks such as Edward B. Hamley’s Operations of War (1866), a training manual for British Army officers, and religious ...”

“... to attend occasional inaugural lectures and dinners which flash one back to the world of John Buchan. I make him a present of one such occasion: as a Rhodes Scholar I was wont to go to the annual Rhodes dinners, loud with the sort of rhetoric which would make Hitchens blench. Traditionally, there had been toasts to the Founder (Rhodes), the Chancellor of ...”

“... which currently criss-cross pastoral England. One would have to go back to the days of John Buchan to find an English fictional hero capable of squeezing so much fun out of driving a car. Should Cullen blow the gaff on Lord Moggerhanger’s exploits? And could the British social fabric survive their exposure? Life goes on has a plot which hinges on ...”

“... Ives and Frank Sinatra all have walk-on parts – the only literary figure who appears is John Buchan, and that as Governor General of Canada. Fox has said she ‘knew certain people, like Alfred Kazin and the Trillings and Philip Roth, but we didn’t have literary discussions. I was mostly cooking for them when they came to dinner.’ Fox’s culinary ...”