#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)

[do-you-know-this-play]

[valiantarcher]

[dickensianenglishbulldog]

[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…

[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:

[lurking-latinist]

.

[andrew-buchan-fansite]

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

[dickensianenglishbulldog]

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

Also Sam Vimes and Richard Hannay

[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

[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.

[vintagegeekculture]

The Evil Little Hairy Cave People of Europe in Pulp Fiction

From the 1900s to the 1940s, there was a trendy theme in occult and horror stories that the explanation for widespread European legends of fairies, brownies, pixies, leprechauns and other malicious little people, was that they were a hereditary racial memory of the extremely small non-human, hairy stone age original inhabitants of Europe, who still survive well into modern times in caves and barrows below the earth. Envious of being displaced on the surface, these weird creatures, adapted to the darkness of living underground and unable to withstand the sun, still mean mischief and occasionally go out at night to capture someone.... usually an attractive woman....to take to their dark caves for human sacrifice.

Displaced by the arrival of Indo-European language speakers at the dawn of the Bronze Age, these original, not quite human stone age people of Europe were driven deep underground into caves and barrows below the earth, where they went mad, adapted to the darkness and acquired a fear of daylight, became extremely inbred, in some cases acquired widespread albinism. It is these strange little people who gave the descendants of Europeans a haunting racial dread of places below the earth like mines and caves, and it also is these strange, hairy troglodytes who originally built the uncanny and mysterious menhir, fairy rings, and stone age structures of England, Scotland, and Ireland that predate the coming of the Celts and Romans.

In some cases, these evil troglodytes are usually identified with the mysterious Picts, the pre-Celtic stone age inhabitants of the British Isles. In some cases, they are identified with the Basque people of Spain, best known as the inventors of Jai Alai, and the oldest people in Europe who speak a unique language unrelated to any in the world.

The original codifier of this trend was Arthur Machen, a horror writer who is less remembered than his contemporary, Henry James, but who may be the best horror writer in the generations between Poe on the one end and Lovecraft/CL Moore/Clark Ashton Smith on the other. His story, "the White People" from 1904 (a reference to their strange cave albinism) was a twisted Alice in Wonderland with a girl who is irresistibly attracted to dark pre-Roman stone age ruins and who is eventually pulled underground.

In addition to being a great horror writer, Arthur Machen was a member of the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn, an occult organization, and was often seen at the Isis-Urania Temple in London. Many of his works have secretive occult knowledge.

H.P. Lovecraft in particular always pointed out Arthur Machen as his single biggest inspiration, though he combined Machen's dread and occultism with Abraham Merritt's sense of fear of the cosmic unknown, seen in "Dwellers in the Mirage" and "People of the Pit."

Another and scarier example of this trend would be "No Man's Land," a story by John Buchan, a Scotsman fascinated by paganism and horror, who often wrote stories of horrific discoveries and evil rites on the Scottish moors. He is often reduced to being described as a "Scottish Ghost Story" writer, a painfully reductivist description as in his career, Buchan wrote a lot of thrillers, detective, and adventure stories as well. In later life, he was appointed Governor General of Canada, meaning he may be the first head of state to be a horror writer.

It was Buchan who first identified the cave creatures with the Picts, something that another Weird Tales writer decades later, Robert E. Howard, would roll with in the 1920s.

Howard is a very identifiable kind of modern person you often see on the internet: a guy who talks tough, but who was terrified to leave his small town. He created manly man, tough guy heroes like Conan the Barbarian, Kull, and El Borak, but he himself never left his mother's house. It's no wonder he got along well with his fellow Weird Tales writer and weird shut in, HP Lovecraft. With 1920s Weird Tales writers, despite your admiration for their incredible talent, you also can't help but laugh at them a little, a feeling you also apply to a lot of Victorians, who achieved incredible things, but who are often closet cases and cranks who died virgins ("Chinese" Gordon comes to mind, as does Immelmann).

With Howard, his obsession with the Picts and the stone age cave dwelling people of Europe started with an unpublished manuscript where at a dinner party, a man gets knocked out and regresses to his past life in the Bronze Age, where he remembers the earliest contact between modern humans and the original inhabitants of the British Isles, the evil darkskinned Picts. This is a mix of both the "little cave people" story and another cliche at the time, "the stone age past life regression novel," another turn of the century cliche.

Still with the Picts on his mind, Howard would later create Bran Mak Morn, a Pict chieftain, who predated Kull and Conan as his Celtic caveman muscle hero. Howard was of Irish descent and proudly anti-Colonial and anti-British, with his Roman Empire and Civilized Kingdoms as a stand in for the British and other Empires, which he viewed as rapacious and humbug, a view shared by his greatest inspiration, Talbot Mundy. His "Worms of the Earth" gets to the heart of why these little cave people scare us so much: they remind us that we live on land that is impossibly ancient and we don't fully understand at all.

It was another Weird Tales Writer a decade later who wrote one of the last stories about the little hairy cave people of Europe, though, Manly Wade Wellman in 1942. Wellman was mainly known for creating the blond beefcake caveman hero Hok the Mighty set in stone age times, and for his supernatural ghost stories of Silver John the Balladeer set in modern, ghostly Appalachia (like many ex-Weird Tales writers, he made a turn to being a regional author in his later career, in the same way Hugh B. Cave became a Caribbean writer), but Wellman also had a regular character known as John Thunstone, a muscular and wealthy playboy known for his moustache who used his great wealth to investigate the supernatural and the occult. Thunstone had a silver sword made by St. Dunstan, patron of Silversmiths, well known for his confrontations with the Devil.

Most John Thunstone stories featured familiar stories, like a demon possessed seance and so on, but one in particular featured a unique enemy, the Shonokins.

The Shonokins were the original rulers of North America, descendants of Neanderthal man displaced by American Indians. This fear that the land we live is ancient and unknowable and we just arrived on it and don't know any of its secrets is common to settler societies, who often hold the landscape with dread, as in Patricia Wrightson's fantasies of the Australian Outback. It was easy enough to transport the hairy cave people from the Scottish Moors to North America. I suspect that's what they are, a personification of a fear shared in the middle class, that in the back of their minds, that everything they have supposedly earned is merely an accident of history, built by rapacity and the crimes of history, and that someday a bill will come due.

A text page in the May 1942 issue of Weird Tales gives strange additional information on the Shonokins not found elsewhere:

Since then, there have been too many examples of evil cave people who predate Europeans. Philip Jose Farmer's "The All White Elf" features the last survivor of a pre-European people who live in caves. A lot of other fiction of course has featured the Picts, but according to our modern scientific understanding, which describes them as much, much less exotically, as a blue tattooed people not too different and practically indistinguishable from the Celtic tribes that surrounded them, and which they eventually blended into.

[jesuisgourde]

A list of all the books mentioned in Peter Doherty's journals (and in some interviews/lyrics, too)

Because I just made this list in answer to someone's question on a facebook group, I thought I may as well post it here.

-The Picture of Dorian Gray/The Ballad Of Reading Gaol/Salome/The Happy Prince/The Duchess of Padua, all by Oscar Wilde -The Thief's Journal/Our Lady Of The Flowers/Miracle Of The Rose, all by Jean Genet -A Diamond Guitar by Truman Capote -Mixed Essays by Matthew Arnold -Venus In Furs by Leopold Sacher-Masoch -The Ministry Of Fear by Graham Greene -Brighton Rock by Graham Green -A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud -The Street Of Crocodiles (aka Cinnamon Shops) by Bruno Schulz -Opium: The Diary Of His Cure by Jean Cocteau -The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson -Howl by Allen Ginsberg -Women In Love by DH Lawrence -The Tempest by William Shakespeare -Trilby by George du Maurier -The Vision Of Jean Genet by Richard Coe -"Literature And The Crisis" by Isaiah Berlin -Le Cid by Pierre Corneille -The Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon -Junky by William S Burroughs -Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes -Futz by Rochelle Owens -They Shoot Horses Don't They? by Horace McCoy -"An Inquiry On Love" by La revolution surrealiste magazine -Idea by Michael Drayton -"The Nymph's Reply to The Shepherd" by Sir Walter Raleigh -Hamlet by William Shakespeare -The Silver Shilling/The Old Church Bell/The Snail And The Rose Tree all by Hans Christian Andersen -120 Days Of Sodom by Marquis de Sade -Letters To A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke -Poetics Of Space by Gaston Bachelard -In Favor Of The Sensitive Man and Other Essays by Anais Nin -La Batarde by Violette LeDuc -Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov -Intimate Journals by Charles Baudelaire -Juno And The Paycock by Sean O'Casey -England Is Mine by Michael Bracewell -"The Prelude" by William Wordsworth -Noise: The Political Economy of Music by Jacques Atalli -"Elm" by Sylvia Plath -"I am pleased with my sight..." by Rumi -She Stoops To Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith -Amphitryon by John Dryden -Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellman -The Song Of The South by James Rennell Rodd -In Her Praise by Robert Graves -"For That He Looked Not Upon Her" by George Gascoigne -"Order And Disorder" by Lucy Hutchinson -Man Crazy by Joyce Carol Oates -A Pictorial History Of Sex In The Movies by Jeremy Pascall and Clyde Jeavons -Anarchy State & Utopia by Robert Nozick -"Limbo" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge -Men In Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century by George Haggerty

[arbitrary line break because tumble hates lists apparently]

-Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky -Innocent When You Dream: the Tom Waits Reader -"Identity Card" by Mahmoud Darwish -Ulysses by James Joyce -The Four Quartets poems by TS Eliot -Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare -A'Rebours/Against The Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans -Prisoner Of Love by Jean Genet -Down And Out In Paris And London by George Orwell -The Man With The Golden Arm by Nelson Algren -Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates -"Epitaph To A Dog" by Lord Byron -Cocaine Nights by JG Ballard -"Not By Bread Alone" by James Terry White -Anecdotes Of The Late Samuel Johnson by Hester Thrale -"The Owl And The Pussycat" by Edward Lear -"Chevaux de bois" by Paul Verlaine -A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting by Richard Burton -Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes -The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri -The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling -The Man Who Would Be King by Rudyard Kipling -Ask The Dust by John Frante -On The Trans-Siberian Railways by Blaise Cendrars -The 39 Steps by John Buchan -The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol -The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol -The Iliad by Homer -Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad -The Volunteer by Shane O'Doherty -Twenty Love Poems and A Song Of Despair by Pablo Neruda -"May Banners" by Arthur Rimbaud -Literary Outlaw: The life and times of William S Burroughs by Ted Morgan -The Penguin Dorothy Parker -Smoke by William Faulkner -Hero And Leander by Christopher Marlowe -My Lady Nicotine by JM Barrie -All I Ever Wrote by Ronnie Barker -The Libertine by Stephen Jeffreys -On Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts by Thomas de Quincey -The Void Ratio by Shane Levene and Karolina Urbaniak -The Remains Of The Day by Kazuo Ishiguro -Dead Fingers Talk by William S Burroughs -The England's Dreaming Tapes by Jon Savage -London Underworld by Henry Mayhew

[inky-duchess]

Do you know anything about the books read by the Romanov family? According to the Romanov family website by Helen Azar (I think?), Alexandra for example owned a book titled The Ladder - but I can’t seem to find any more information on it?

I couldn't find anything on The Ladder. Of course, it's hard to know exactly what they all read but there are a few books mentioned in some texts and those found at Ipatiev House (I left off some religious texts)

Madame Chrysanteme by Pierre Loti

The Narratives of a Hunter by Turgenyev

Anna Kareninia by Tolstoy

Greenmantle by John Buchan

War and Peace by Tolstoy

On Paris by Avenarius

Reflections by Popov

My Opining Kingdom

The Country of Dwarves

Takes of Shakespeare

The Fables of La Fontaine

Anthology of Childhood by Frederick Bataille

The Role and the Ring

The Eaglet by Roatland

The Princess and the Goblin

France and all it's Epoques

Of Patience in Suffering

The Life and Miracles of St Simon the Just of Verkoutsk

The Wider Life

Audacious Life by Tcharski

History of Peter the Great by Tchistiakov with blue green cover

The King Mambo by Paul du Chulus