John Buchan Quotes

“A son of the Free Church Manse brought up to Calvinism, he adopted at Oxford first rationalist philosophy, and then the social asumptions of the English establishment, and often writes as if he were in fact descended from a long line of Cotswold squires. His last work of fiction, Sick Heart River gives a lucid account of his own development, and seems to me to be a deliberate effort to reconcile himself with life and death throught the charcter of Edward Leithen, of whom he says, 'it is possible to keep your birth-right and live in a new world - many have done it.' But not, I think, without acquiring a permanent inner loneliness and sense of exile.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction

“Buchan's less polemical evaluation of 1932, with its focus on the historical context of Scott's writing, recognised the author's virtues, but did little to change the narrative of his limitations. Beside the reminder that the author 'knew his native land as no Scotsman had ever known it before', the insight that Scott's popularity and its international extent 'has had a paralysing effect' on his critical study sounded no warning to critics determined to mark themselves separate from Scotland's supposed cultural and literary provincialism.”
― Caroline McCracken-Flesher, The International Companion to Nineteenth-Century Scottish Literature