John Buchan
John Buchan (1st Baron Tweedsmuir) was a Scottish novelist and public servant who combined a successful career as an author of thrillers, historical novels, histories and biographies with a parallel career in public life. At the time of his death he was Governor-General of Canada.
Buchan was educated at Glasgow and Oxford Universities. After a brief career in law he went to South Africa in 1902 where he contributed to the reconstruction of the country following the Boer War. His love for South Africa is a recurring theme in his fiction.
On returning to Britain, Buchan built a successful career in publishing with Nelsons and Reuters. During the first world war, he was Director of Information in the British government. He wrote a twenty-four volume history of the war, which was later abridged.
Alongside his busy public life, Buchan wrote superb action novels, including the spy-catching adventures of Richard Hannay, whose exploits are described in The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr. Standfast, The Three Hostages, and The Island of Sheep.
Apart from Hannay, Buchan created two other leading characters in Dickson McCunn, the shrewd retired grocer who appears in Huntingtower, Castle Gay, and The House of the Four Winds; and the lawyer Sir Edward Leithen, who features in the The Power-House, John Macnab, The Dancing Floor, The Gap in the Curtain and Sick Heart River.
From 1927 to 1935 Buchan was Conservative M.P. for the Scottish Universities, and in 1935, on his appointment as Governor-General to Canada, he was made a peer, taking the title Baron Tweedsmuir. During these years he was still productive as a writer, and published notable historical biographies, such as Montrose, Sir Walter Scott, and Cromwell.
When he died in Montreal in 1940, the world lost a fine statesman and story-teller.
The John Buchan Society was founded in 1979 to encourage continuing interest in his life, works and legacy. Visit the website (http://www.johnbuchansociety.co.uk) and follow the Society on Twitter (www.twitter.com/johnbuchansoc) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/johnbuchansociety).
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Buchan and Encyclopeadia Britannica
“The men who knew that he knew what he knew had found him”
“Beklager så meget , sa han. Jeg er ikke helt meg selv i kveld. Saken er nemlig den at jeg er død i dette øyeblikk.”
“I skumringen kom mannen hennes tilbake fra heiene. Det var en mager kjempe som tok ett skritt der andre dødelige trengte tre.”
“The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.”
“I'm an economical soul, and if I'm going to be hanged I want a good stake for my neck.”
“I get into a tearing passion about something I know very little about, and when I learn more my passion ebbs away.”
“I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.”
“This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man’s-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life.”
“It was a strange staging for death, for the woman on the high bed was dying. Slowly, fighting every inch of the way with a grim tenacity, but indubitably dying. Her vital ardour had sunk below the mark from which it could rise again, and was now ebbing as water runs from a little crack in a pitcher.”
“The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.”
“The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them.”
“It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.”
“It was a soft breathless June morning, with a promise of sultriness later...”
“My thoughts hovered over all varieties of mortal edible, and finally settled on a porterhouse steak and a quart of bitter with a welsh rabbit to follow. In longing hopelessly for these dainties I fell asleep.”
“He felt singularly light-hearted, and the immediate cause was his safety razor. A week ago he had bought the thing in a sudden fit of enterprise, and now he shaved in five minutes, where before he had taken twenty, and no longer confronted his fellows, at least one day in three, with a countenance ludicrously mottled by sticking-plaster.”
“I began to get really keen, for every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.”
“To spend your days on such work when the world is chockful of amusing things. Life goes roaring by and you only hear the echo in your stuffy rooms.”
“We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.”
“I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not braver than other people, but I hate to see a good man downed, and that long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place.”
“An old woman with a mutch sat in an arm-chair behind the counter. She looked up at me over her spectacles and smiled, and I took to her on the instant. She had the kind of old wise face that God loves.”
“He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly, but because he felt deeply.”
“How will you deal with him?" Belses asked.Jock lifted a brawny fist and regarded it lovingly. "Knock him out-- truss him up-- whatever the Almighty permits us."Supposing he's not alone?"Oh, then, if his trusties are with him, there'll be a bonny rumpus.”
“Jock put his shoulder to the framework and the whole thing crumbled inward with a crash of glass. "Rotten as touch-wood," he said. "This place would never stand a siege.”
“An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.”