The recent commemorations surrounding the 150th anniversary of John Buchan’s birth – not least in The Spectator – have stirred up literary memories for me. Not of Buchan or his work particularly, I was a little too old for the glaring coincidences of The Thirty-Nine Steps when I read it in my twenties, but of a lifelong Buchan-admirer I knew slightly, the late author Peter Vansittart.

Unlike many, Vansittart, a historical novelist among other things, took Buchan seriously, extolling ‘the romantic… the novelist, the adventurer… tolerant and humane.’ Buchan’s The Three Hostages he read every year, he said, as a kind of ritual: ‘curtains drawn, telephone unhooked, the fireside, the whisky, the old delight.’ Dick Hannay’s opening words in Greenmantle – ‘I had just finished breakfast and was filling my pipe when I got Bullivant’s telegram’ – were for him as exciting as anything in Sherlock Holmes. One way or another, Buchan seemed to have run like a thread through Peter’s life.

It was a life I caught the tail end of, meeting Peter when he was well into his seventies – a tall, tweed-jacketed figure with ramrod-straight back and an impossibly posh voice – redolent of the 1930s Third Programme. But for the wearing of an incongruous yellow hairpiece, he looked just like the ex-schoolmaster he was. At his Belsize Park house, where he spent half his time and let rooms dirt-cheap to the indigent, I’d visit him regularly – a kind of monthly tutorial – and pick his brains about the past.

Vansittart was a walking compendium of literary life, and generous with his time and knowledge. Born in 1920, he’d rubbed shoulders with Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene, interviewed George Bernard Shaw, taken tea with Lord Alfred Douglas, and done book reviews for Orwell, even standing in for the great writer on his ‘As I Please’ column when Orwell was otherwise disposed.

Possessing no TV, dedicated almost monastically to literature, Peter read and reread voraciously and had written more than 40 works – modern and historical novels, biographies, memoirs,........

© The Spectator