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“... On the whole the young Thesiger belonged to the second category. He read the novels of John Buchan and Rider Haggard, Jim Corbett’s tales of tiger hunting, Rowland Ward’s Records of Big Game, Blackwood’s Tales from the Outposts, Jock of the Bushveld, Henri de Monfreid’s account of smuggling across the Red Sea, Churchill’s The River War and, of ...”

“... stress of that divided inheritance. Their emblematic and exemplary representative is surely John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, biographer of Montrose, who contributed to MacDiarmid’s Scottish Chapbook, compiled in 1924, an anthology of Scots vernacular writing, and wrote a flattering preface to MacDiarmid’s Sangschaw. In this anthology their very muted ...”

“... had been fortunate ‘to find as their historian the greatest living master of narrative’, John Buchan wrote in his review when the book appeared in April 1923. In an honourable sense that judgment needs qualifying. Kipling had no experience of writing such a narrative; he had never even written a normal novel. His preferred oblique technique, as shown in ...”

“... but Ellmann’s lacrimae rerum have smudged the wrong pages altogether. The dust-jacket of James Buchan’s latest novel informs us that Slide is about ‘agonising loss: loss of hope, loss of control, loss of will’. This intelligence came as something of a relief, because I would never have twigged while reading the book itself. ‘Loss’ seems too ...”

“... team of naturalists made sample collections and Parkinson and the other official artist, Alexander Buchan, diligently sketched. Buchan had been hired for the non-natural-history work, but it soon turned out that his recruitment had been a mistake. Subject to epileptic fits, his health was not up to the stresses of the voyage ...”

“... Birmingham Six, and the old decencies seem perilously contingent. To take one actor in Annan. John Buchan – in some ways a key figure of politics and culture in 20th-century Scotland – appears as a straightforward inter-war Tory, a somewhat archaic consensus-monger tainted by Appeasement. Seen from the north, he is much more ...”

“... book, it isn’t; nor is it run of the mill. It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its anxieties and lunacies are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.As a child Henry Rider Haggard was believed to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... giving him cause to think twice, a lost ballot confirms him in a sense of his own rectitude. John Buchan has an elderly cabinet minister say of Dominick Medina, a charismatic but deeply dangerous politician: ‘the point is has he a policy, something he wants to achieve, and has he the power of attaching a party to him?’ Has Dr Owen a policy? He has ...”

“... for even partial success. John Ross was to look for a northwest passage through Baffin Bay; David Buchan was to head north past Spitsbergen, with luck into the open polar sea and out the Bering Strait into the Pacific. On 29 August, Ross entered Lancaster Sound, north of Baffin Island. If only he’d known it, he’d found the way into the northwest ...”

“... king just so that two centuries later it could commune with the spirits of Cecil Rhodes and John Buchan in neo-imperialist seances alongside the set of countries bearing the queen’s head on their coins. But this hasn’t stopped certain Anglosphericals formulating a new mythology of Anglo oneness. In his 2006 book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples ...”

“... was always a storyteller for boys, in the tradition (a very good one) of R.L. Stevenson and John Buchan. In A Sort of Life, which was as near to an autobiography as he was ever prepared to go (and itself the result of psychotherapy for a period of writer’ block), Greene tells how he first came to keep a record of his dreams. Though it’ not at all clear ...”

“... and there was nothing like empire to give vanity rocket-like lift. In Karsh’s photograph of John Buchan, who was governor of Canada in the 1930s, the wildly popular novelist wears a North American Indian war bonnet, his weathered face is in semi-profile, he’s wearing gloves, and he looks as if he could take on an army on his own. Sargent’s portrait of ...”