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’.
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