Word: buchan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...shouldn't be and that stuff, they were all taken over by the secret world. The moods that I remember, the self-perceptions I had, were very positive, very negative; I was brilliant, I was a complete idiot. I entered it in the spirit of John Buchan and left it in the spirit of Kafka...
...quite a while before writers find an arena as morally complex or financially rewarding. Before World War II, the spy novelist usually took the low road: the hero was implausibly good, as in John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps. Evil was unambiguous. Sax Rohmer invested his villain, Fu Manchu, "with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race . . . the Yellow Peril incarnate." But in the postwar period the public grew weary of caricatures, and only Ian Fleming could profitably drive on the old thoroughfare, with men like Doctor No and Goldfinger in the backseat...
...self, he found himself a double agent at a tender age, a student at the Berkhamsted School, where his father reigned as headmaster. Naturally, his classmates made his life miserable, and Greene sought retreat in voracious reading. But the drama served up by his favorite authors (among them John Buchan and Joseph Conrad) reminded Greene that he had been born at an unpropitious time. "We were," he wrote, "a generation brought up on adventure stories who had missed the enormous disillusionment of the First World War." At Oxford, he dabbled in writing and later drifted into newspaper work, eventually becoming...