Word: buchan
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...less equestrian suspense stories that are also novels of métier and manners. His best books are Dead Cert (the first, written in 1962), Nerve (1964), For Kicks (1965), Odds Against (1966) and Forfeit (1969). At that level he belongs in the company of writers like John Buchan, who created a highly personal genre and then used it, beyond sheer entertainment, to express a lifetime's accumulation of knowledge and affection...
They are each by an English writer, and the English have excelled at this kind of thing since Doyle, Buchan and Oppenheim foiled the foreign malefactors. But something has happened to the genre since those simple times when everybody knew who the enemy was. Eric Ambler led a school during the United Front period of the '30s with wonderfully atmosphered thrillers in which the heroes, or their allies, were Soviet security...
...Since 1945 the nations of the world have almost doubled in number, from 68 to 127. Each new country has its own self-interest, its own power of decision and-thanks to the cold war and the resulting supplies of weapons and military training-its own armed forces. Alastair Buchan of London's Institute for Strategic Studies points out that there are more military men acting as political leaders than at any time in the 20th century." He cites Pakistan's President Mohammed Ayub Khan, Burma's Ne Win Thai land's Thanom Kittikachorn, Egypt...
...ultimately conceivable, as Robert Kennedy speculated in a recent speech, that "nuclear weapons might be used between Greeks and Turks over Cyprus, between Arabs and Israelis over the Gaza Strip, between India and Pakistan in the Rann of Kutch." Defense experts such as Alastair Buchan, director of Britain's respected Institute of Strategic Studies, take a more sober view of the possibilities of proliferation but foresee, nonetheless, that the number of nuclear powers may well grow from five to 15 in the next 20 years...
...Behind every dune of hitherto deserted Arabia lurks a lengthy exchange of dreary dialogue. These booby-traps are the work of Robert Bolt, formerly a play-wright of some note, whose screenplay is a gallimaufry of all the cheap movies and pulp novels you have never liked: John Buchan, Shane, etc., etc. Bolt's Bedouin farce is never, to be sure, intentionally funny, and everybody on screen somehow manages to keep a straight face when O'Toole (Lawrence) announces in one of the film's obviously epiphanal moments that he likes the desert because "it is clean." None of Bolt...