The Interpreter's House: A Critical Assessment of the Work of John Buchan

John Buchan has been respected and revered by a large following, but he has also been criticised as a Jew-hater, racist, purveyor of "snobbery with violence" and jingoist. In The Interpreter's House, the first full-length analysis of Buchan's work, David Daniell contests that such criticism is both irrelevant and wrong. He also discusses Buchan's literary development carefully and minutely, showing his progress as a novelist from his first fiction, Sir Quixote, written in his teens, to his last, the much-misunderstood Sick Heart River forty-five years later. Buchan is seen, too, as a biographer of stature, from his early work while an undergraduate at Glasgow University to the substantial, full-length accounts of Montrose and Sir Walter Scott, Cromwell, Julius Caesar and Augustus Caeser.