John Buchan

John Buchan (1875–1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian and public servant, the son of a Free Church minister. After Oxford he worked for Lord Milner in South Africa, practiced law, ran a publishing house and served in intelligence and propaganda during the First World War, writing a twenty-four-volume history of it as it went along. The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) introduced Richard Hannay, who returned in Greenmantle, Mr. Standfast and two later books; he also wrote historical novels, biographies of Montrose, Scott and Cromwell, and over a hundred books in all. He sat in Parliament, was created Baron Tweedsmuir in 1935 and died in office as Governor General of Canada.