“... 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 ...”

“... continued to oppose tea on grounds of its stimulating and anti-soporific effects – William Buchan thought that tea was to be avoided in cases of melancholy and flatulence – but an expert consensus in its favour emerged. To the extent that tea was understood as a drug, it was generally judged a good one, repressing ‘vapours’, calming the ...”

“... Charlie Chaplin, who seems to have been on everyone’s guest list. Lawrence knew John and Susan Buchan, country-house owners of the new weekending sort, and spent his time with them talking about ‘the Arabs … his muddled masochism and his … disillusion’; Baldwin appears at Warwick Castle and at Madresfield, which was in part the model for ...”

“... right to stress his subject’s affinity – especially in his own mind – with the typical Buchan hero. There was always something rather dashing, in an old-fashioned way, in Knight’s approach to security matters. He practised an especial vigilance in the matter of Communist agitation. Reds, Jews and homosexuals were three groups against whom Knight ...”

“... of walking round, revolved round one aspect of my reading – Rider Haggard, Coral Island, John Buchan, G.A. Henty, Captain Marryat, and Lancelyn Green’s version of Malory. In my fantasies I was either a chivalric knight riding in quest of adventure, or a young boy journeying in foreign parts: both these characters obeyed an ethos which, quite ...”

“... of a double-decker bus in 1929. (He subsequently recorded with relish the pukka comment of John Buchan: ‘Most unfortunate fellow. Always fracturing his skull.’) But the brain-damage explanation for his becoming a Marxist, while perhaps acceptable at the height of the Cold War, may by now seem somewhat physiologically reductive, and alternative ...”

“... Walter Pater. His biographer develops this line by mischievously placing him in the world of John Buchan heroes (in unguarded moments, O’Malley’s own language bears him out: ‘I had few real chums but what I had were staunch’). The revolutionaries of 1916-21 set great store by Ireland’s distance from Britain and from British mores, partly so as to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered the secret world ‘in the spirit of John Buchan and left it in the spirit of Kafka’; allowing for quite a lot of exaggeration at both ends, it’s a reasonable comment on The Spy who Came in from the Cold, which combines a focus on dingy bureaucratic settings with a pessimistic, formally dazzling ...”

“... language occasionally confuses his readers, critics and even his admirers. It’s what made James Buchan describe the novel’s terrain, in the Guardian, as ‘a Persian miniature under some terrible curse’; and provoked Adam Mars-Jones, in the opening sentence of his admiring review in the Observer, to tackle this question: ‘There isn’t enough beauty ...”

“... I’d invented the phrase ‘snobbery with violence’ to describe the school of Sapper and Buchan (and Ian Fleming, for that matter), but then I was told it had been used before, but where and in what circumstances I have forgotten. The form of Forty Years On is more complicated than I would dream of attempting now. It is a play within a play in which ...”

“... to some extent, by a lively and well-informed account of the Mecca Siege written by James Buchan, of the Financial Times. Johns is an unabashed Western chauvinist: he seems to dislike Saudi Arabia, has little sympathy for its people and their ways. He would like to see them behaving, as nearly as possible, like readers of the Financial Times. His text ...”

“... shilling-shockers, and the pattern will reveal itself. English fascism hidden in the pages of John Buchan. A schoolteacher living in retirement who remembers William Joyce as a benevolent father. Sitting in this Canterbury bar, revellers with the revel burnt out of them, Seabrook refusing food (never seen to eat), I can understand how the local, the areal, is ...”

“... who got there first, or how, but at one point we were both roaring through the novels of James Buchan and when we sat down to lunch together could barely contain our enthusiasm, like a couple of teenage girls gushing about a cute new boy at school. During our final lunch, the Thursday before the Sunday he died, we discussed the anthology (‘They’ll ...”

“... lasted ever since. But in his warm evocation of this boyhood, the kind you might imagine a John Buchan hero to have had, there is also (and not for the last time) a utilitarian chill. Aged 13, he allows himself to be seduced by the household’s part-time maid, aged 16, whom he finds in his bedroom in an inviting posture. Never one to waste an ...”