Kevin Jackson
He Went from Peak to Peak
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan
By Ursula Buchan
Bloomsbury 492pp £25 order from our bookshop
The following exchange comes from Alan Bennett’s glorious Forty Years On, Act Two:
Leithen: Is he sane?
Sandy: Sane? He is brilliantly sane. The second sanest in Europe. But like all sane men he has at one time or another crossed that thin bridge that separates lunacy from insanity…
Audiences watching the play’s first run in 1968 would probably have spotted the nature of the parody much more readily than theatregoers fifty-one years on would. Bennett is evoking the world of ‘Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature’.
Buchan and co were, if we are to credit the Molesworth books (and we should), the authors of ripping yarns about clean-limbed heroes and dastardly foreign johnnies that all schoolboys read before reaching puberty and discovering Aldous Huxley. It’s a fair bet that today’s brighter lads would be
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Sixty years ago today, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space. @Andrew_Crumey looks at his role in the space race.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/one-giant-leap-for-mankind
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match
'She lived in a damp basement with her mother and sister, smoking roll-ups and talking to her parrot.'
Joanna Kavenna traces the life of the 'almost-forgotten poet' Charlotte Mew.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-hated-poetry-readings