Word: buchan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Novelist John Buchan, first Baron Tweedsmuir (for his Scottish birthplace) of Elsfield (for his home in Oxford), died last February in his 66th year, his fifth as Governor General of Canada, he had already finished the autobiography his career made inevitable. This provision was of a piece with the career-workmanlike, ordered, conscientious, religiously dutiful -which the last of John Buchan's 50-odd books records...
...Presbyterian parson, "the best man I have ever known," wry-faced little John Buchan grew up in the poetry and parsimony of the Scottish border, went to Oxford on Caledonian determination and a shoestring, published his first book (Scholar Gipsies) to help pay his college expenses. He was admitted to the bar, but his life work really began when he was made Private-Secretary to the High Commissioner for South Africa, Lord Milner. From Milner and Kitchener he absorbed an extraordinary philosophy of empire which inspired him to the end of his days. This philosophy, which the later John Buchan...
...politics because he thought it was his duty. When his great friend and hero George V sent him to Ottawa in 1935, when he had already made an imperial name for himself as a novelist and biographer and had adjudged himself too old for a career in Parliament, John Buchan sprang into action like one of Milner's young war horses, did a difficult job as ably as his teachers did theirs a generation before...
...nothing do the portraits of John Buchan bear a slight resemblance to those of Calvin Coolidge. His native taciturnity reinforced by a diplomat's decision to write "at length only of the dead," Autobiographer Buchan was evidently not writing for posthumous publication. Of the mental climate in which he grew up, the architecture of his life and his world, he writes warmly and well. Of himself, he tells as little as an autobiographer decently...
...Others: Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the London Times, the late John Buchan (Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor General of Canada), Sir Patrick Duncan, Governor General of Union of South Africa...