John Buchan

John Buchan (1875–1940) was a Scottish novelist, poet and statesman, born in Perth and educated at Glasgow and Oxford. He is best remembered for his adventure novels, above all The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), and for his histories and biographies, among them a life of Montrose.

His Poems, Scots and English (1917) gathers verse in the Lowland vernacular of his boyhood together with English lyrics and ballads, several of them written during the First World War, in which his younger brother Alastair was killed at Arras.

He sat in Parliament, was created Baron Tweedsmuir in 1935 and served as Governor General of Canada from that year until his death in 1940.