WE have not long passed the birthday of John Buchan and are approaching that brisk but barren season of the year where he loved to test the heroes of his novels by bringing them face to face with improbable perils.

In real life, he consistently enticed new readers, so that he became during his time the most popular of Scottish authors. For all I know, he may still occupy this enviable spot, though more likely he has nowadays been surpassed by blockbusters of science fiction.

Even so, unlike them, he has been continuously in print since his first novel, Sir Quixote of the Moors, came out in 1895. He was then a student in his last year at the University of Glasgow, and won from there a scholarship to Oxford.

It was the start of the long ascent from the Free Church manse of his birth – rich in values, sparing of rewards – to the arresting variety in private and public eminence that marked his career. He finished up as governor general of Canada, still loving the wilderness and exploring its mysteries when, by this time visibly fading, he died in 1940. Scotland does not make men like that any more.

But there may be readers of The National who say “good riddance!” The greatest of the causes to which Buchan devoted himself was the British Empire. The concept came to life for him when he went out with a team of young idealists to rule and restore the defeated Afrikaner republics in 1901 at the end of the Second Boer War. He could not help admiring the obstinacy of their resistance to the overbearing Brits, which was to preserve Boer nationalism right through the 20th century.

READ MORE: Bridging the literary gap at media dinner parties

South Africa was, he thought, “a sort of celestial Scotland”. He was not to know that the course of history would turn it into a pariah state excluded from decent international company by its system of apartheid. The wonder is that Buchan’s novels are not yet regarded as fit for boycott. Probably that would seem absurd, given how popular they are. But then, political correctness is not easily discredited by its own absurdity.

I have brought Buchan up in this context for the very reason that we live in times when authors, or others of some intellectual standing, can get hounded from their positions of authority because they are reckoned to be politically incorrect. This is not a matter merely of vicious minorities and stuck-up moral policemen. We have just seen it almost become the cause ~ of the murder of Salman Rushdie.

Human beings need not normally go so far, let alone beyond. Buchan is little known as a poet, but in 1917 the experience of world war inspired him to compile a volume of Poems, Scots and English, which included verse in the Scots vernacular. It showed him to be a master of it.

He was one of several poets of the period who could and did write in Scots or English according to the subject matter or some other relevant aspect of their work.

No less a critic than Hugh MacDiarmid approved of Buchan as a Scots poet. MacDiarmid afterwards included Buchan’s poems in anthologies with which he launched the Scots language movement, Northern Numbers (1920-21). He dedicated his psychological studies, Annals of the Five Senses (1923), to Buchan. In return, Buchan wrote a friendly introduction to MacDiarmid’s first personal collection of poetry, Sangshaw (1925).

In 1924, Buchan had edited The Northern Muse: An Anthology of Scots Vernacular Poetry. Readers delighted in it as giving real substance to the literary renaissance, and MacDiarmid praised it as the best available anthology of Scots verse.

Although the Unionist Buchan and the Marxist MacDiarmid appear to be strange bedfellows, Buchan believed in a strong Scotland within a British Empire which he viewed as a community of nations, not a greater England.

There was absolutely no doubt in his mind that Scotland would belong to it in some shape of its own, whether as kingdom, “free state” or people’s republic.

Buchan’s career continued to be pulled in two directions, the political and the literary. He was an official lawyer and a professional propagandist. He worked for a posh publisher and broke into the popular market with his own thrillers, Prester John (1910) and The Thirty-Nine Steps (1914).

And he was building up a political base from which he hoped to launch a campaign as a Unionist for a parliamentary seat in his beloved Borders, where he had happy memories of family and childhood.

His health was poor, however, and though he made a great contribution to the war effort, it was never, to his regret, as a regular soldier. Medically unfit, he spent the war behind desks.

Granted he performed some useful functions, why should we otherwise admire this Tory?

He is of a type that has more or less vanished from (almost) self-governing Scotland, which does not seem to regret him much.

Even so, it was important and responsible work. Buchan grasped that propaganda was a key to the war effort. He worked as a correspondent along the Western Front, painting an optimistic gloss on the mud and the blood. By 1916 he was transferred to headquarters, drafting communiques for the intelligence corps. He worked tirelessly to place selective information in the public domain.

He wrote books on individual battles and the History of the War in 24 volumes, started as a series by Nelsons while the conflict was still going on, and designed to raise British confidence in victory.

Buchan might afterwards have joined the literary Scottish Renaissance if the war had left him at a loose end. But there was no chance of that. Instead he moved on to another public stage.

He was elected Unionist MP for the Scottish Universities (1927-35), and felt disappointed he did not reach the Cabinet in the national government.

Otherwise he might have hoped to become Prime Minister two or three terms down the line. He might have carried on as a historian. He was appointed Lord High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland (1933-34). Created Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield in 1935, he left the deepest impression on his third homeland, Canada. As a nationalist type, he was not too mean but too generous in his loyalties.