I should have done a bit more on Buchan before my first post. I stand corrected on the IO statement.
John Buchan (1875-1940) was a polymath who was born the son of a Calvinist presbyterian minister in eastern Scotland, and died Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor-General of Canada. He was a classicist at Oxford, read for the Bar but did not practice as a barrister, was a government administrator in South Africa after the end of the Boer War, was editor of The Spectator and war correspondent for The Times, was Member of Parliament for the Scottish Universities, a Director of Reuters, a director of Thomas Nelson's, the publishing house, and was His Majesty's High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, twice. He married into the minor aristocracy, had four children and was made a Baron (lowest rung of the British hereditary peerage) on receiving the appointment of Governor-General of Canada in 1935. He was very popular in his Canadian service, travelling all over the country to meet the people and see the land, Arctic to US border, east to west, and made important political links with President Roosevelt of the United States. He died of a brain haemorrhage while shaving, shortly after signing Canada's entry into the Second World War.
And he wrote. By golly did he write. The list of his published books is well over a hundred in number, and only about 40 of these are fiction. John Buchan is most famous for The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle, and his thrillers and short stories are all in print today. His historical novels are not quite so well known, although there are many cheap editions around, since Buchan came out of copyright briefly when British copyright law decreed a 50-year limit, and for a few glorious years you couldn't move in a British bookshop without tripping over a Buchan novel. But nothing stands still in law, and Buchan is now back in copyright, until 2010.
Buchan's historical novels deserve a far greater readership, as do his biographies and historical studies, still regarded as classics of scholarship. Buchan also wrote a textbook for accountants: The Law according to the Taxation of Foreign Income, possibly the only one of his works not to have a devoted readership.
