Spectator Books: Ursula Buchan on her grandfather, John Buchan

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2019

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

In this week's books podcast, Sam is joined by Ursula Buchan - the author of a hugely involving new life of her late grandfather John Buchan. The book is called Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps (you can read Allan Massie's enthusiastic Spectator review of it here), and it does as the title promises. Buchan (or "JB" to his family) is known, if he's known now at all, as the author of the pre-war thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, later filmed by Hitchcock. Yet here was a man of staggering range and energy - diplomat, historian, politician, propagandist, poet, barrister, publisher, and (most important of all) one-time assistant editor of The Spectator. He was a proud Scot who lived most of his life out of Scotland, and whose travels took him from Boer South Africa to the Governor-General's mansion in Canada. Here's John Buchan in the round - and a granddaughter talking about how and why she sought to make his memory her own.

Presented by Sam Leith.

Spectator Books is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes of Spectator Books here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Spectator Radio. If you'd like to subscribe to The Spectator, you can get 12 issues for £12
0:05.1	pounds, as well as a £20 pound Amazon voucher. Just go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:18.2	Hello, welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast.
0:26.2	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and in this week's podcast, I'm joined by Ursula Buckin,
0:30.4	who will be well known to many readers of the magazine as a superb writer on gardening.
0:34.7	But this time we're talking about her work as a biographer.
0:39.2	Her new book is a biography of her grandfather, John Bucken,
0:45.2	and it's called Beyond the 39 Steps. Welcome, Mr. Very nice to be here. Thank you for asking me,
0:51.6	Sam. Well, the first, and I hope it won't seem an important question to ask is, what made you think I'd like to write a biography of John Bucking? Because, of course,
0:54.7	there are a few in existence. Was this an act of grand filial piety?
1:00.6	No, really, really not. But there hadn't been one for 25 years. And I was about a few years ago,
1:10.5	I decided to have, you when the when all the sort of
1:13.5	whirlwind of career making and charm rearing is over I decided to read the canon or as much of
1:21.7	it as I could and there's a lot of it more than a hundred books more, more than a thousand articles, many of them, of course, for the spectator.
1:31.4	And I read lots of things I'd never read before.
1:35.4	I'd read the short stories, but not for a long time.
1:37.7	The war poetry I'd never read.
1:39.4	I'd never read the political thought, and I certainly hadn't read the legal textbook.
1:43.4	And I hadn't read all the serious
1:45.8	biographies of Walter Scott Cromwell. I had read Montrose but years and years before.
1:53.0	So anyway, my thoughts became more insistent that he was beginning to become just the junior partner of the great Alfred Hitchcock.
2:04.6	People knew him really only as the man who wrote the 39 steps and not even spelled the right
	...

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