#john buchan

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

Some sort of a vibe

Sources: "The West Wind", by John Masefield (x); "Hy-Brasail - the Isle of the Blest", by Gerald Griffin (x); "Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Centenary Edition" (x); "The Far Islands", by John Buchan (x); "The Return of the King", by JRR Tolkien (x); Tumblr post by @geopsych (x)

[detroitlib]

From our stacks: Cover detail from The Thirty-Nine Steps. John Buchan. With the Illustrations of Edward Gorey. Franklin Center, Pennsylvania: The Franklin Library, 1988.

[do-you-know-this-play]

[valiantarcher]

[dickensianenglishbulldog]

[mysterious-secret-garden]

John Buchan - Tales of mystery and imagination.

[streamondemand]

Alfred Hitchcock's 'The 39 Steps' on Max and Criterion Channel

The 39 Steps (1935), Alfred Hitchcock’s first great romantic thriller, smoothly plays the “wrong man” gambit with the light, black-humored grace that would reach its apex in North by Northwest. Robert Donat stars as Richard Hanay, an affable Canadian tourist in London who becomes embroiled in a deadly conspiracy when a mysterious spy winds up murdered in his rented flat and both the police and a…

[ukdamo]

Avignon

John Buchan

Hearts to break but nane to sell, Gear to tine but nane to hain;— We maun dree a weary spell Ere our lad comes back again. I walk abroad on winter days, When storms have stripped the wide champaign, For northern winds have norland ways, And scents of Badenoch haunt the rain. And by the lipping river path, When in the fog the Rhone runs grey, I see the heather of the Strath, And watch the salmon leap in Spey. The hills are feathered with young trees, I set them for my children's boys. I made a garden deep in ease, A pleasance for my lady's joys. Strangers have heired them. Long ago She died,—kind fortune thus to die; And my one son by Beauly flow Gave up the soul that could not lie. Old, elbow-worn, and pinched I bide The final toll the gods may take. The laggard years have quenched my pride; They cannot kill the ache, the ache. Weep not the dead, for they have sleep Who lie at home: but ah, for me In the deep grave my heart will weep With longing for my lost countrie. Hearts to break but nane to sell, Gear to tine but nane to hain;— We maun dree a weary spell Ere our lad comes back again.

[pageadaytale]

BOOK REVIEW ROUNDUP - A Trio of Quick Classics

This past month I took a bit of a break from non-fiction. I was feeling burnt-out on facts and figures, and no matter how much they dress it up a science book is by neccessity going to include some science. So instead of reading more non-fiction, I spent most of June reading some classics! Here's three that were quick, easy, and also pretty good:

#1: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

It's a classic for a reason! Brief synopsis: Ebeneezer Scrooge is a miserly businessman who steals even the coal from his worker's fire, and he's visited on Christmas Eve by three ghosts who attempt to change his wicked selfish ways! I honestly found this a little difficult to get into - a quirk of Dickens's writing style, where he'll fill a page with musings on the shape of a door-knocker because he's getting paid by the word - but once it gets going, it goes. It doesn't let up, as we move from one ghost to the next, and it's a heartwarming and touching story which is helped by humanising Scrooge with a tragic past on several levels. The ghosts are memorable and witty, and they provide some much-needed lessons for Scrooge. We all know the story, and it ends with a Happily Ever After. A little slow to start, but excellent as it goes.

#2: The Outsider by Albert Camus

Also known as The Stranger, this novel by Albert Camus is about the injustice of the justice system. It follows Mr Mersault, a Frenchman living in Algeria, who seemingly feels nothing the way he is supposed to. On the day of his mother's funeral he is tired, but not sad, and in the days after he returns to his life as normal. When he falls in with the wrong crowd and kills a local, his trial focuses more on his personality and his apparent lack of emotion than on his actions or the events surrounding the murder.

The Outsider resonated with me, in part because I see the justice system every day, but also because it's easy to feel like my emotions do not match people's expectations at any given point. It can be seen as a scathing indictment of the justice system's callous disregard of mental health - where judges have the right to lock you up indefinitely for any crime, if they believe you are not mentally "well" enough to simply go to jail; and where police are the first responders to any emergency, and are not trained to deal with a mental health crisis, so they usually resort to their standard tactics: brute force and arrests. I feel Mersault's pain as the jury and the crowd in court judge him for his idiosyncracies and quirks, rather than for the crime he committed. It's a quick read, and one with unexpected depth.

#3: The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

So of the three, this was my least favourite. That's mainly because it starts off with a wildly anti-semitic plot point. Our protagonist, straight-talking adventurer Richard Hannay, is fed up with life in London, where he's spending his days going from one function to another and talking with the most boring diplomats and businessmen. Just when he's thinking of throwing it all in and heading back to Africa, a man turns up on his doorstep with a tale to tell: there's a shady group of people controlling the actions of the world governments and they're aiming to plunge the world into war! Buchan is not coy about naming the Jews here, and he'll leave you with that impression for fully half the book, so I'm going to spoil it now and reveal that, surprise! The Jews have nothing to do with the government-controlling world-war plot! Turns out the first guy was a British spy who just so happened to be suuuper-anti-semitic and blamed every plot on them. Good job his death is the catalyst to get the plot started! Suddenly Hannay must dodge secret-society goons and the Metropolitan Police as he escapes London for his childhood home of Scotland, meets a bunch of people along the way who help him out, and generally has a cracking good adventure for a few weeks.

Anyway, it turns out it's the Germans orchestrating the whole world-war thing, Hannay uncovers one of the goons disguised as the First Sea Lord stealing naval secrets, and the whole story culminates in a showdown at a townhouse overlooking the sea in Kent, which is extraordinarily well-written and made me worry that Hannay had in fact got the whole thing wrong! It's a shame that after that, the ending is kinda a downer: despite stopping the leak of national secrets and taking down the Black Stone, our secret society bent on world destruction, the march to war is now inevitable, and Hannay enlists and is bumped up to Captain immediately. He considers it a noble endeavour; there's no mention that he has failed utterly in his purpose, save perhaps for preventing the war turning the war in Germany's favour with British naval secrets being stolen.

Overall, it's the kind of rip-roaring adventure you'd see in kid's fiction not too long ago, only with more adult themes and some dated references. And racism. A whole lot of racism.

Conclusion

Look, sometimes you just have to read some classics. If I were ranking them, The Outsider comes first, followed by A Christmas Carol and then The Thirty-Nine Steps is a distant third. The other two are just a little deeper, and they're not steeped in a general first-world-war era xenophobia. I would say they're all worth a read - The Thirty-Nine Steps if only for its pacing and as a quintessential example of an adventure novel.

Overall, if you need a break from your usual fare, you can't go wrong with a classic. Especially if they're less than two-hundred pages.

[frimleyblogger]

The Seven Sleepers

My thoughts on The Seven Sleepers by #FrancisBeeding #BookReview

A review of The Seven Sleepers by Francis Beeding – 231221 Originally published in 1925, The Seven Sleepers, written by the duo, John Palmer and Hilary Saunders under the nom de plume of Francis Beeding, is an all-action thriller very much in the style of John Buchan’s Thirty Nine Steps. There are murders, three particularly brutal ones, but the focus of the story is whether the narrator, Thomas…

[dirtyriver]

This is a really great movie. The novel is pretty cool too.

Now watching:

[andrew-buchan-fansite]

So, Mr Crespigney, you had developed an attachment to the missing, broken harness?

[alexrideraep]

had a random urge to edt andrew buchan or ian rider to artic monkeys idk even know why i just feel like it 

[priokskfm]

#FREEDOWNLOADS #FREEPROMO #RADIOCHART *** FREE D/L *** Gil Scott Heron - Lady Day and John Coltrane (Andy Buchan Edit) WAV here :: https://ift.tt/eD4Knku My edits got taken down from Bandcamp - but pick up the originals there now and I'll send over a package of edits as well for free :-) Bandcamp WAV :: https://ift.tt/46twXo8 Скачать: https://ift.tt/mCvkSEl https://ift.tt/ozrkmQg

[dickensianenglishbulldog]

I feel that Lord Peter and Sir Percy would get on well.

Also Sam Vimes and Richard Hannay

[doyouwanttoseeabug]

The same list was also talking about how John Buchan was a conservative which, yeah, but also is he a Conservative Novelist or a novelist who happens to be a deeply colonial conservative? He's not doing what Trollope and, say, Waugh are doing - there isn't a political and social argument being played out in the 39 Steps or Greenmantle. He's just writing Fun and Racist stories about white people saving the day. It's still worthy of criticism but I don't think you can describe Castle Gay as a reactionary ideological project in the same way that the Paliser novels are.