The Imaginative World of John Buchan

IT HAS BEEN SAID that one of the marks of greatness in a writer is that his characters cease to be ‘people in a book’, becoming instead the intimate friends of the reader. By that test alone John Buchan, the centenary of whose birth we remembered on August 26, was certainly a great craftsman, for the characters of his novels have been for many years now my familiar and well‐loved friends.