Category: Buchan of the Month

Top Ten Tuesday: Inspirational/Thought-Provoking Book Quotes (The John Buchan Edition)

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Top Ten Tuesday newTop Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

  • Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want.
  • Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to The Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post.
  • Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists.
  • Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

This week’s topic is Inspirational/Thought-Provoking Book Quotes. As a John Buchan nerd, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to construct my list from some of his many books, fiction and non-fiction.

“A man may be tired of the country, but when he is tired of London he is tired of life.” Samuel Johnson in Midwinter

“Of all the good gifts of a beneficent Providence to men…I think that none excels a well-appointed inn.” Samuel Johnson in Midwinter

“[…]the true task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.” The King’s Grace

“A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different.” Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps

“Every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.” Edward Leithen in The Power-House

“To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.” Memory Hold-The-Door

“I have been happy in many things, but all my other good fortune has been as dust in the balance compared with the blessing of an incomparable wife.” Memory Hold-the-Door

“It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken.” Mr. Standfast

“You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism.  I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass.” Andrew Lumley in The Power-House

“He had never been lonely in his life before he met her, having at the worst found good company in himself; but now he longed for a companion, and out of all the many millions of the earth’s inhabitants there was only one that he wanted.” Jaikie in The House of the Four Winds

 

 

Buchan of the Month: Introducing Midwinter by John Buchan

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Midwinter is the fourth book in my John Buchan reading project, Buchan of the Month 2019.   You can find out more about the project and the books I read in 2018 here, and view my reading list for 2019 here.

MidwinterWhat follows is an introduction to Midwinter.  It is also an excuse to show a picture of my Nelson edition of the book with its charming dust jacket.  I will be posting my review of the book later in the month.

Midwinter was published in the UK on 6th September 1923 by Hodder & Stoughton and in the United States on 29th August 1923 by George H. Doran, Buchan’s American publisher.

It was begun in June 1921 at Elsfield Manor, the country house in Oxfordshire John Buchan had purchased in 1919 and which became his family home.  (You can find out more information about Elsfield and the Buchan family’s life there here.)

His first biographer, Janet Adam Smith, describes Midwinter as ‘the first fruit of Buchan’s love-affair with his new home, the record of his exploration of it in space and time’.   The book features what she calls ‘the greatest character from Elsfield’s story’, namely Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had walked out from Oxford to have tea with Mr. Francis Wise (a former owner of Elsfield) in the summer of 1754.

Janet Adam Smith characterises the book as ‘a brisk, exciting tale’ saying that its ‘spring and life come from Buchan’s delight in the Oxfordshire country and in the feeling about the past which they gave him’.  Kate MacDonald describes Midwinter as ‘a fine Buchan mystery thriller’ and comments that the character, the eponymous Midwinter, might be a grown-up Puck taken from Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. David Daniell notes that Midwinter was widely admired, including by J. B. Priestley.  He describes its main tones as ‘zest and alertness’ and ‘an eager new response to countryside’.

In her new biography of her grandfather, Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps, Ursula Buchan quotes John Buchan’s own comments that in Midwinter he had attempted ‘to catch the spell of the great midland forests and the Old England which lay everywhere just beyond the highroads and the ploughlands’.  Indeed, Midwinter is subtitled ‘Certain Travellers in Old England’.

Midwinter, like all Buchan’s historical novels, was less commercially successful than his more well-known thrillers.  Janet Adam Smith reports that it sold 16,000 copies in its first year after publication and had combined sales by 1960 (for the Hodder & Stoughton edition and the later Nelson edition) of 112,000.    For comparison, The Thirty-Nine Steps had sold 355,000 copies by the same date.

Sources:

Ursula Buchan, Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan (Bloomsbury, 2019)

David Daniell, The Interpreter’s House: A Critical Assessment of the Work of John Buchan (Nelson, 1975)

Kate Macdonald, John Buchan: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction (McFarland, 2009)

Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan: A Biography (OUP, 1985 [1965])

Kenneth Hillier and Michael Ross, The First Editions of John Buchan: A Collector’s Illustrated Biography (Avonworld, 2008)

buchan of the month 2019