All the Sad Sages

Ferdinand Mount: Bagehot, 6 February 2014

Memoirs of Walter Bagehot 
by Frank Prochaska.
Yale, 207 pp., £18.99, August 2013, 978 0 300 19554 5
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... publication of Bagehot’s work and because his editor St John Stevas and his biographer Alastair Buchan were long associated with the paper. And the cocksure, worldly-wise tone of its columns is a living memorial to Walter Bagehot. The one exception to the uncritical reception comes from a writer whose only connection with Bagehot was that he happened to ...

Back to Runnymede

Ferdinand Mount: Magna Carta, 23 April 2015

Magna Carta 
by David Carpenter.
Penguin, 594 pp., £10.99, January 2015, 978 0 241 95337 2
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Magna Carta Uncovered 
by Anthony Arlidge and Igor Judge.
Hart, 222 pp., £25, October 2014, 978 1 84946 556 4
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Magna Carta 
by J.C. Holt.
Cambridge, 488 pp., £21.99, May 2015, 978 1 107 47157 3
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Magna Carta: The Foundation of Freedom 1215-2015 
by Nicholas Vincent.
Third Millennium, 192 pp., £44.95, January 2015, 978 1 908990 28 0
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Magna Carta: The Making and Legacy of the Great Charter 
by Dan Jones.
Head of Zeus, 192 pp., £14.99, December 2014, 978 1 78185 885 1
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... which have a soft spot for God’s Englishman. Christopher Hill skips lightly over it. John Buchan refers to it as ‘a farmyard jape’ and excuses it on the grounds that ‘this thing touched the heart of his authority and he could permit no weakening.’ Others suggest that the story is probably royalist propaganda (it occurs in Clarendon’s History ...

Heimat

David Craig, 6 July 1989

A Search for Scotland 
by R.F. Mackenzie.
Collins, 280 pp., £16.95, May 1989, 0 00 215185 5
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A Claim of Right for Scotland 
edited by Owen Dudley Edwards.
Polygon, 202 pp., £14.95, May 1989, 0 7486 6022 4
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The Eclipse of Scottish Culture 
by Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull.
Polygon, 121 pp., £6.95, May 1989, 0 7486 6000 3
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The Bird Path: Collected Longer Poems 
by Kenneth White.
Mainstream, 239 pp., £12.95, May 1989, 1 85158 245 2
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Travels in the Drifting Dawn 
by Kenneth White.
Mainstream, 160 pp., £12.95, May 1989, 1 85158 240 1
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... which is about his past. Here the terse humour, the work and the home life of Buchan fisherfolk and railwaymen are beautifully detailed, and by no means all smoothed by the amber varnish of an affectionately-remembered seedtime. The root of his radicalism is incarnate in the station clerk who shared a shack with a shunter which they called ...

The History Boy

Alan Bennett: Exam-taking, 3 June 2004

... them in on who Virginia Woolf was or put them in the picture about Lady Ottoline Morrell; Sapper, Buchan, Osbert Sitwell – to the boys these must have been names only, familiar to the principal players, John Gielgud and Paul Eddington, but as remote to the rest of the cast as historical figures in Shakespeare. This omission was partly because with only four ...
George Macaulay Trevelyan: A Memoir 
by Mary Moorman.
Hamish Hamilton, 253 pp., £9.95, April 1980, 0 241 10358 4
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Public and Private 
by Humphrey Trevelyan.
Hamish Hamilton, 208 pp., £8.95, February 1980, 0 241 10357 6
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... linked him between the wars with G.M. Young, Baldwin, Kipling, Arthur Bryant, Helen Waddell, John Buchan and Vaughan Williams, who together form a cultural unity which needs discussion. During the second war, the same qualities made his Social History (1944) as much an expression of the wartime thirst for other worlds as Brideshead Revisited or The Unquiet ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Where I was in 1993, 16 December 1993

... style: ‘Her mind was as sharp as any I have known.’ Thus Charles Moore on Shirley Letwin. Buchan is alive and editing the Sunday Telegraph.11 July. An ex-prisoner turns up at the Drop-In Centre in Parkway. He is violent and the Centre telephones Social Services for help, who tell them to send him round. The Centre does so, phoning to say that he’s ...

Anglo-Egyptian Attitudes

Marina Warner, 5 January 2017

... will betray that early imprint of adventure and empire yarns by G.A. Henty and C.S. Forester, John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard, literature in which the world is ‘British’.I don’t remember what I read, just a mood, a pace. But I know writers don’t conceal their attitudes. And their glorying in the derring-do and brigandry are part and ...

Social Arrangements

John Bayley, 30 December 1982

The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry 
edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion.
Penguin, 208 pp., £1.95, October 1982, 0 14 042283 8
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The Rattle Bag 
edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.
Faber, 498 pp., £10, October 1982, 0 571 11966 2
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... J.C. Squire literary atmosphere, which Dunn summons up by a pretence of       being a John Buchan of the underdog With my waistcoated breast puffed against the wind. And yet however well organised it is, much of the overt ‘feeling’ in these poems, as in many of those in the anthology, remains second-hand, not truly sui generis; and the reason is ...

Thin Ayrshire

Andrew O’Hagan, 25 May 1995

... the remnants of an older order. Galt’s first memory was to do with the religious sect of Mrs Buchan, a local cult of spiritualists who broke from the Kirk and proclaimed knowledge of the New Jerusalem. They were hounded from the town, and a great procession followed them, howling and merrymaking, and jostling the Buchanites on their way. John Knox ...

Narco Polo

Iain Sinclair, 23 January 1997

Mr Nice: An Autobiography 
by Howard Marks.
Secker, 466 pp., £16.99, September 1996, 0 436 20305 7
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Pulp Election: The Booker Prize Fix 
by Carmen St Keeldare.
Bluedove, 225 pp., £12.99, September 1996, 0 9528298 0 0
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... the Porn’) in a CIA sting operation in Canada. Travelling in Afghanistan, like a John Buchan clubman-adventurer, just ahead of the war zone. Always there, never remembered. ‘Double-dealing provocateur, arms salesman, terrorist (but for whom, no one had ever figured out) ... covert MI5 operative’. Whitehead’s favourite image is the ...

On the imagining of conspiracy

Christopher Hitchens, 7 November 1991

Harlot’s Ghost 
by Norman Mailer.
Joseph, 1122 pp., £15.99, October 1991, 0 7181 2934 2
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A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs 
by Theodore Draper.
Hill and Wang, 690 pp., $27.95, June 1991, 0 8090 9613 7
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... better moments,’ remarked Hugh Montague.It’s some help to be English, and brought up on Buchan and Sapper, in appreciating the dread kinship between toffs and crime.Yet this gruff, stupid masculine world is set on its ears by one courtesan. ‘Modene Murphy’, who is Mailer’s greatest failure of characterisation here, is perhaps such a failure ...

Upper and Lower Cases

Tom Nairn, 24 August 1995

A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707 
edited by John Robertson.
Cambridge, 368 pp., £40, April 1995, 0 521 43113 1
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The Autonomy of Modern Scotland 
by Lindsay Paterson.
Edinburgh, 218 pp., £30, September 1994, 0 7486 0525 8
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... The choice inherent in the structure he describes can be expressed in the difference between John Buchan’s father and Buchan himself: smalltown stuffed-shirt or high-administrative panjandrum. Both very successful, of course, one cannily beneath nationality in the troublesome sense, and the other philosophically far above ...

Cityphilia

John Lanchester: The credit crunch, 3 January 2008

... in its dealings with customers, unlike the four main high street banks which are, as James Buchan once wrote, ‘mere burdens on the earth’. Not one saver in ten thousand would have been aware that the reason the Rock’s interest rates were so competitive was that it dealt on the global markets to fund itself. Only 27 per cent of its funds were ...

The Atmosphere of the Clyde

Jean McNicol: Red Clydeside, 2 January 2020

When the Clyde Ran Red: A Social History of Red Clydeside 
by Maggie Craig.
Birlinn, 313 pp., £9.99, March 2018, 978 1 78027 506 2
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Glasgow 1919: The Rise of Red Clydeside 
by Kenny MacAskill.
Biteback, 310 pp., £20, January 2019, 978 1 78590 454 7
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John Maclean: Hero of Red Clydeside 
by Henry Bell.
Pluto, 242 pp., £14.99, October 2018, 978 0 7453 3838 5
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... city during the First World War. ‘The world is gettin’ socialism now like the measles,’ John Buchan’s old Borders radical Andrew Amos says in Mr Standfast (1919), but most people remained unaffected by the epidemic.By 1913, according to T.C. Smout in A Century of the Scottish People 1830-1950, Glasgow made ‘one fifth of the steel, one third of the ...

The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
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... spent his afternoons in post-lunch slumbers; O’Donovan went on self-destructive binges; Alastair Buchan, the novelist’s son, combined a barking, military voice with bouts of drunken violence. Meanwhile, the editor (the proprietor of ‘Dr Astor’s clinic’ as some knew it) sipped a modest glass of white wine or Mateus rosé. Michael Davie recalled that ...