The recent commemorations surrounding the 150th anniversary of John Buchan’s death – not least in The Spectator – have stirred up literary memories for me. Not of Buchan or his work particularly, I was a little too old for the glaring coincidences of The Thirty-Nine Steps when I read it in my twenties, but of a lifelong Buchan-admirer I knew slightly, the late author Peter Vansittart.

Unlike many, Vansittart, a historical novelist among other things, took Buchan seriously, extolling ‘the romantic… the novelist, the adventurer… tolerant and humane.’ Buchan’s The Three Hostages he read every year, he said, as a kind of ritual: ‘curtains drawn, telephone unhooked, the fireside, the whisky, the old delight.’ Dick Hannay’s opening words in Greenmantle – ‘I had just finished breakfast

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