John Buchan
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘John Buchan’
Two British spies look out over war-torn Belgrade, and find the inspiration they need to go on with their dangerous mission.
In John Buchan’s Great War novel ‘Greenmantle’, published in 1916, Richard Hannay and Peter Pienaar are spying for the Allies, making their way under cover through occupied lands to Constantinople. At Belgrade, recently captured by Austria-Hungary, they look on the devastation of war and their hearts go out to the brave people of Serbia.
Self-confessed Scottish Nationalist John Buchan warned Scots that there was more to democratic prosperity than having a Parliament.
In November 1932, John Buchan MP told the House of Commons that he supported Home Rule for Scotland in principle, but warned that no Parliament has a magic wand, and that an over-mighty and bitterly anti-English Parliament might leave Scots as much a race without a country as no Parliament at all.
John Buchan warned that the great figures of history are often beyond their biographers’ comprehension.
John Buchan had little time for the kind of historian who makes a career out of rubbishing reputations, pulling the great (if flawed) figures of history down from their pedestals in the hope of some scattered applause from his peers. Some giants of history are quite simply too big for their critics.
Just as Richard Hannay was steeling himself to report failure in the hunt for a German agent, a stranger’s eye caught his own.
On the eve of the Great War, Richard Hannay has gone to Sir Walter Bullivant’s house in Queen Anne’s Gate to report failure in the search for the ‘Black Stone’ — a German spy and master of disguise whom Hannay alone can identify. Sir Walter, however, is closeted with Lord Alloa, head of the Navy.
Human beings should not be frantic cogs spinning away in the Government’s factory of Progress.
John Buchan contrasted his view of society, as a delicate ecosystem of living plants suited to a particular climate and soil, with the economic abstractions of political experts in Germany and the Soviet Union, for whom people were mere cogs and pistons in the pounding machine of Government.
John Buchan draws a distinction between political changes brought by violence and those brought by progress.
John Buchan’s historical research and long experience in Government led him to believe that revolutions achieved little. Political betterment, he argued, comes not from violent overthrow by small, ideologically-driven groups of activists but from the natural wasting away of repression owing to popular dislike.