Novelist, historian, and politician John Buchan spent the last five years of his long and productive life as the fifteenth Governor General of the Dominion of Canada.

He was also a colonialist, a racist, and an antisemite. His racism and antisemitism were quite casual in nature, the inevitable product of his class, his position, and his ardent worship of Anglo-Saxon cultural supremacy, garnished with just a wee dab of Celtic mysticism.

John never had a progressive idea in his life, but as a Scottish unionist and nationalist, a British imperialist, and a bred to the bone Tory, any such thought would have ruined the perfect idealized view of the world he held so dear.

His supernatural fiction shows an amazing talent for detail in description, and is the ultimate in creepy, if you know what I mean.

The Watcher at the Threshold is watching you!

Or Margaret, as we are intending to call her these days.

Oliphant was one of the most popular, long-lived, and successful lady novelists of the Victorian age, publishing almost one hundred novels across the timely wingspan of six decades. This was quite a (pocket) change from the (nominally) more tragic authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Margaret lost her husband to overwork and exhaustion after just seven short years of wedded bliss, with six children appearing in quick succession, three of whom died in infancy. Her surviving daughter died at ten, and both of her surviving sons died in their thirties. Mrs. Oliphant outlived them all.

Margaret survived three years after her last son was taken from her, writing steadily all the while, right up to the very end. The will to write can be stronger than the will to live. Especially when you make a lifelong habit out of it.

William Sydney Porter never was a shorter

Tip he did, and so splendid

They said he was a sport.

Er…

Was it murder, suicide, or unnatural causes?

How many short stories did he actually write while he was in New York?

Somerset Maugham, he missed the prom
He had a confrontation
With spirit, soul, and Heinrich Böll
In silent conflagration

The true origin of Ian Fleming’s James Bond is none other than Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden!

Little known fact #62

George Gissing was always missing
Something in his makeup
He dreamt his dreams of all that seems
But then could never wake up

He loved Dickens. But did Dickens love him back?

Arthur Machen was always smackin’

Women mysteriously

He helped create modern neopaganism

Before joining the Ministry of Truth

After the war, he enjoyed a brief resurgence

Before taking his final fitting place

In the annals of ecstasy and horror

Ambrose Bierce was nothing fierce

Except within his cups

His swords his wands his demimondes

And on occasion tups

Conservatives are those with a soft spot for preexisting evils;

Liberals in contrast typically exhibit a stronger taste for newer ones.

Just ask Colin Dexter and Chief Inspector Morse.

Edgar Poe waxed full of woe
He sang a song of sadness
He filled his days with minstrel rays
His nights bore down to madness

Take this kiss upon thy brow
And in parting from me now
This much more let me avow:

You are wrong should you not deem
All my days to be a dream.

Yet if hope is flown away
In a night or in a day

In a vision or yet none
Is it thereby less the gone?

All we see or seem to see
Is a dream within a dream.

To the glory that was Greco

And the grandeur that was Roma

I lingered round them under that benign sky;

watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells,

listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass,

and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers

for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

So the story goes.