Was there no end to his talents?

John Buchan was a novelist, historian, poet, biographer and journalist (assistant editor of The Spectator indeed); a barrister and publisher; one of Lord Milner’s ‘young men’, charged with the reconstruction of South Africa after the second Boer war; director of propaganda 1917–18, a Member of Parliament; lord high commissioner (i.e. the king’s representative) to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland; governor-general of Canada. Yet the title of this excellent biography by his granddaughter is to the point. He is best known today as the author of a thriller he wrote in a few weeks in 1914 which, more than 20 years later, was made into a film by Hitchcock.

The book is still read; the film, which Buchan thought better than the book, still watched. As a girl, Ursula Buchan was surprised to find it had given rise to a Bingo call: ‘39, all the steps.’ In 2003, she tells us, ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps came 44th in the Observer’s list  of the greatest novels of all time, one above Ulysses.’