He is meticulous in exploring Buchan’s non-fiction and poetry, as well as his novels, and a master at teasing out the themes that make Buchan’s work so popular: the importance of success, the Calvinist’s redemption through hardship, the healing power of nature, the infiltration of the mole in the pay of a wicked power, usually foreign. Yet his biography – the first study of Buchan in 20 years – is not entirely successful.The book’s strongest asset is its literary criticism. Was he too ambitious, or not adroit enough politically?On the face of it, you couldn’t find a better candidate to answer those questions than Andrew Lownie. Both men were schooled in Scotland: Buchan went to Glasgow University and then Oxford, and Lownie to Edinburgh and Cambridge. Like Buchan, Lownie has been a law student, journalist, Conservative candidate, and has worked in publishing. He sits on the council of the Buchan Society, has edited collections of Buchan’s poetry and short stories, and has written the introductions to several of Buchan’s novels Yes, Lownie would have been my first choice too. Although Governor-General of Canada when he died in office in 1940, Buchan had spent many of the intervening years scratching at the doors of power, longing to be called to serve in the Cabinet and begging for some honour in recognition of his wartime propaganda work On both these counts, he failed.

He ended the war a household name, his adventurous heroes setting the pace for thriller writers to come.
Yet Buchan’s initial promise as an academic and man of public affairs – after gaining a First at Oxford and the presidency of the Oxford Union – never really materialised. In a review of Greenmantle in 1916, The Bookman pointed out that in terms of career opportunities there was little to choose between Buchan and another author and budding statesman Winston Churchill, and that “the future of Mr Buchan is just as hard to predict as that of Mr Churchill.” Winston Churchill, of course, went on to become arguably the most important Englishman of the 20th century. But what of Buchan?

The thin-faced eldest son of a Scottish Free Church minister, Buchan was 41 when The Bookman review came out. Before the First World War, he had been a reasonably well-known novelist.

JOHN Buchan’s most popular novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps, was published in 1915; his most commercially successful, Greenmantle, a year later. It turned out that the critic had been knocked out by mixing alcohol with a cold “cure” produced by the very south London drugs company whose exports Vaughan had originally laboured over The powdered dragons had finally had their revenge.. He discovered that he was having to provide not just questions but answers as well – the poor interviewee had temporarily lost the power of speech; he abandoned live radio at once and soon left the country. That is not quite as unlikely as it sounds, to judge by his experience when interviewing a critic about a new book on the comedian Fatty Arbuckle. Despite drying completely, he began moonlighting in the media and finally ended up on the now deceased World Medicine. Because of that he became the token science presenter on the infant Kaleidoscope. And when that programme decided to rid itself of the science strand, he stayed on as an arts presenter The student film reviews had finally come into their own.

Maybe he had a career plan after all.Exciting Times in the Accounts Department is as enjoyable as any of the books that Kaleidoscope holds up to the light Perhaps Vaughan could interview himself about it. However, he was once asked, by virtue of working for the BMA, to join in a radio discussion with a medical theme. Today doctors are as furious as their patients at the demolition of the NHS; yet in its early years many would have driven the bulldozers themselves. It must have been like working for the National Rivers Authority and disapproving of the existence of water.Vaughan could have been there for life, entertaining himself with jokes at his colleagues’ names (of a silent Dr Catto it was said that “Catto, as usual, lay doggo”). The BMA, a sort of medical trade union only more militant, was anxious to obtain favourable publicity for its permanent financial gripes. Since doctors, even when wearing heavy-duty surgical gloves, were unwilling to dirty their hands by dealing with journalists, this task was delegated to 30- year-old whippersnappers like him.He seems to have been one of the few denizens of the imposing BMA headquarters who actually approved of the infant National Health Service. As an arts graduate who had written a few film reviews for the student magazine, he might not have been an ideal recruit for the drugs industry but job prospects were different in those days – that is, they existed and they were for life.It took Vaughan almost half a decade to escape from the powdered dragons but finally, on the strength of his pharmaceutical knowledge, he was taken on in the press department of the British Medical Association.