Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps by Ursula Buchan

Author:Ursula Buchan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

*The memorandum contained representative names from writers, clergy of every stripe, trade unionists, journalists and editors, politicians, intellectual Socialists and Liberal aristocrats.

*Cf. Peter Pienaar and his fate in Mr Standfast.

*He told the Provost of Peebles that he believed whole-heartedly in a League of Nations, not because he was a dreamer, idealist or humanitarian but because he was a practical man. ‘I want us not only to have won the war but to bank our winnings and I can see no other way but this.’ JB to the Provost of Peebles, 1 January 1919, Queen’s University Archives, John Buchan fonds, locator 2110, box 3.

*When Walter Scott wanted to be a Baron of Exchequer, he wrote to the Duke of Buccleuch: ‘… a man may, without condemnation, endeavour at any period of his life to obtain as much honour and ease as he may handsomely come by’. Quoted in John Buchan, Sir Walter Scott, Cassell, London, 1932, p. 167.

**A great many were given out after the war for acts of public service. For example, William Jury, head of the Film Department in the Ministry of Information and junior to JB, received one.

*The elderly Miss Parsons moved to another house in the village and became a friend as well as an important ally in Susie’s attempts to interest an evasive female population in the benefits of belonging to the Women’s Institute that she founded in the early 1920s.

*The house became the grandest of golf clubhouses.

*A ‘Royal’ has antlers with fourteen points. It is now in the John Buchan Museum in Peebles.

*The gold watch given to him by the John Knox congregation when he went to Oxford shone brightly from constant use.

*Catherine Carswell, a novelist who had also published books on Robert Burns and D. H. Lawrence, helped Susie to put together two books, The Clearing House and John Buchan by his Wife and Friends, after the Second World War.

*He was later a literary critic, biographer and public lecturer in the United States.

**The house plays a part in Midwinter.

*Rimmon was a Syrian god, mentioned in 2 Kings, chapter 5. Naaman, the Syrian commander, although cured of his leprosy by the prophet Elisha, still feels he must support his king physically, by bowing down when he did in Rimmon’s temple. What Helen Buchan seems to have missed, but JB would not have done, was that Naaman did it only out of loyalty.

**They were baptised into the Church of Scotland.

*A quarter of an old penny. The first print run must have been an impressive 24,000.

*Professor Rait was a popular Principal of the University from 1929 to 1936.

*This book was still being given out as a reader when I first arrived at grammar school in the mid-1960s.

*Baillie Nicol Jarvie is an important figure in Rob Roy.

**Scott scholars will no doubt find other associations in the book.

*First encountered as a brave but insubordinate RFC pilot in Mr Standfast, Sir Archie Roylance – airman, ornithologist and Scots laird – was one of JB’s favourite creations, appearing in six novels, and referred to in two more.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.