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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the 17th century, when English and European commerce was expanding by leaps and bounds,’ James Buchan wrote in Frozen Desire, ‘the best Scots minds felt acutely the shortage of … what we’d now call working capital; and Scots promoters were at the forefront of banking schemes in both London and Edinburgh, culminating in the foundation of the Bank of ...”