As well as a writer John Buchan was a published historian, lawyer, editor, war correspondent, government administrator, MP and director of a successful publishing house. He was born, the first son to a Free-Church minister and his wife Helen Jane Masterson, in 1875. Raised in the village of Pathhead on the Fife coast, he attended school in nearby Kirkcaldy until 1888, when the family left Fife for Glasgow where his father took up a new ministry.

Aged seventeen Buchan obtained a scholarship to study classics and mathematics at Glasgow University but he was a solitary youth and financial constraints prevented him from socialising widely. A second scholarship enabled Buchan to continue his studies at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he eventually graduated with a Doctor of Laws. During this time he wrote prodigiously and several of his stories and essays were published.

During his writing career he is thought to have published some one hundred books, only forty or so of which are fiction. Buchan was a huge admirer of the writing of Sir Walter Scott, whose Romantic influence marks the adventure stories, ‘where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible,’ for which he was best known. However, he regarded writing as an inferior career and sought to make his name in the wider arena of British, imperial politics.

Upon graduating, Buchan pursued a successful career as a barrister and later as private secretary to the High Commissioner for South Africa, Lord Milner, between 1901 and 1903. He married Susan Grosvenor in 1907 and was to become father to four children. In 1909 Buchan began work for the publisher Thomas Nelson and Sons during which he spent a great deal of time writing for and editing the The Spectator Newspaper.

During the war Buchan worked as a war correspondent for The Times newspaper before joining the army, and his most famous thriller, The Thirty Nine Steps (1915), which introduced the spy-catching character Richard Hannay, was based on a real-life character from Buchan’s own time serving with the British army. He served on the Headquarters Staff of the British Army in France as temporary Lieutenant Colonel (1916-17). Buchan was made Director of Information (1917-18) and, briefly, Director of Intelligence, under the Lloyd George administration. After the war Buchan became a director of the news agency Reuters.

From 1927-35 Buchan was Conservative MP for the Scottish universities. He had then a number of important government posts, serving among others as Lord High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland (1933-34). 1n 1935 Buchan moved to Canada where he became Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield and the thirty fifth Governor General of Canada- a position he held until his death in 1940.