John Buchan (1875-1940) was a polymath who lived in the Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian eras, through the Boer War and the First World War. As well as being a writer for over forty-five years, he was a civil servant, a journalist, a publisher, a war propagandist, a historian and biographer and a politician and diplomat. His wife, Susan Grosvenor, was a cousin of the Duke of Westminster and connected with much of the landed aristocracy of the British establishment. Buchan's own family was of respectable but not wealthy farming stock from the Scottish Borders. He was the eldest of six siblings, a father of four, and a devoted son to a most trying mother. He studied Classics at Oxford, read for the Bar, worked in South Africa as an Imperial civil servant, was deputy editor of The Spectator, went into publishing, and in the First World War became Britain's Director of Intelligence. He became deputy-director of Reuters, and was a Member of Parliament until he was ennobled by George V and became Governor-General of Canada. He died in 1940.