Worldly and otherworldly

In ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’, John Betjeman has Wilde whimper to Robert Ross: ‘So you’ve brought me the latest Yellow Book:/ And Buchan has got in it now:/ Approval of what is approved of/ Is as false as a well-kept vow.’ It is a marvellous scene, but not quite accurate. As a thousand Buchanites will clamour, Wilde was arrested in April 1895 and Buchan’s first story appeared in Aubrey Beardsley’s gorgeous fin-de-siècle magazine only the following January. Meanwhile, just a glance at this illustrated new selection of stories shows that John Buchan was the opposite of conventional.

The story in question, ‘A Captain of Salvation’, tells of a man brought low by drink and hard living, now an officer of the Salvation Army in the East End. He can resist the temptations of women and the flesh but not an old confederate and the lure of picketing up in the Drakensberg or dropping down the Irrawaddy.