Greenmantle - Buchan, John

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Résumé :
The second of John Buchan's five books with the Richard Hannay character is titled Greenmantle. London's Hodder & Stoughton published it for the first time in 1916. The other Hannay book set during the Great War is Mr. Standfast (1919). The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Hannay's earliest and best-known adventure, takes place in the years just before the war. Hannay travels through dangerous enemy territory to see his friend Sandy in Constantinople after being asked to look into reports of an insurrection in the Muslim world. Once there, he and his companions must foil German efforts to exploit religion as a weapon of victory, which will culminate in the battle of Erzurum. Hannay and his friend Sandy are in the book's opening scene recovering from injuries sustained during the Battle of Loos in November 1915. Senior intelligence officer Sir Walter Bullivant summons Hannay to the Foreign Office. Bullivant informs Hannay on the Middle Eastern political situation, implying that the Germans and their Turkish allies are planning to incite a Muslim rebellion that will destabilize the region as well as India and North Africa. Robert Baden-Powell and the Russian imperial family both read the book when it was first released as they awaited the outcome of the revolution in 1917.

Biographie:
John Buchan (1875 - 1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation. After a brief legal career, Buchan simultaneously began his writing career and his political and diplomatic careers, serving as a private secretary to the colonial administrator of various colonies in southern Africa. He eventually wrote propaganda for the British war effort in the First World War. Buchan was in 1927 elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities, but he spent most of his time on his writing career, notably writing The Thirty-Nine Steps and other adventure fiction.

Sommaire:
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir was born in Perth, Scotland in 1875, the son of the Reverend John Buchan, a Presbyterian clergyman, and his wife Helen Masterton, the daughter of a sheep farmer. He read classics at the universities of Glasgow and Oxord before embarking on a career spanning the London bar, the Fleet Street press, the northern and southern hemispheres of the British Empire, the Houses of Parliament, and the long wooden shelves of literature. Best known today for his adventure stories, and in particular The Thirty-Nine Steps, which Alfred Hitchcock brought to the cinema in 1935, he was a stakhanovite of English letters, penning dozens of novels and historical works in all. He died in Montreal in 1940....