Freemantle

I recently read Freemantle by John Buchan (1916). A ripping yarn of the finest quality but, more interestingly, packed with the prejudices of the time. For those who don't care this sort of thing themselves, here are some choice examples of racism, sexism, anti-semitism and (repressed homosexual) homophobia. Buchan, of Thirty Nine Steps fame (Freemantle is the second in the Richard Hannay series), was a very popular figure, who became an MP and, finally, Governor-General of Canada. As it says in the introduction to the Penguin edition, "selective quotation can make him seem absurd, or disgraceful" so here goes...

Senior civil servant and 'good guy', Sir Walter Bullivant, on the Germans - "You are an intelligent fellow, and you will ask how a Polish adventurer, meaning Enver, and a collection of Jews and gipsies should have got control of a proud race."

On a sympathetic, yet enemy, German - "Gaudian was clearly a good fellow, a white man and a gentleman. I could have worked with him for he belonged to my own totem."

On another sympatico German - "That fellow gave me the best 'feel' of any German I had met. He was a white man and I could have worked with him. I liked his stiff chin and steady blue eyes."

On a 'bad' German's poor notion of psychology - "In Germany only the Jew can get outside himself, and that is why, if you look into the matter, you will find that the Jew is at the back of most German enterprises."

The 'bad German again - "There had never been a woman's hand in that place. It was the room of a man who had a passion for frippery, who had a perverted taste for soft delicate things. It was the complement to his bluff brutality. I began to see the queer side to my host,"

Richard Hannay on himself - "I could see that I was becoming rather a figure in the captain's eyes. He liked the way I kept the men up to their work, for I hadn't been a nigger-driver for nothing."

On a swaggering Turkish official - "He strutted away and it was all I could do to keep from running after him. I wanted to lay him over my knee and spank him."

Hannay and his pal are of low cheer - "We were both in pretty poor spirits. 'Europe is a poor cold place,' said Peter, 'not worth fighting for. There is only one white man's land, and that is South Africa.' At the time I heartily agreed with him."

They are accosted by some Turkish ruffians - "They jabbered among themselves, and then one said very slowly: 'He...want...pounds,' and he held up five fingers. They evidently saw by the cut of our jib that we weren't Germans."

Hannay goes for a drive with Hilda von Einem, the evil yet beautiful German lady behind the conspiracy - "Women had never come much my way, and I knew about as much of their ways as I knew about the Chinese language... I had never been in a motor car with a lady before, and I felt like a fish on a dry sandbank. The soft cushions and the subtle scents filled me with acute uneasiness."

Hannay's pal, Sandy Arbuthnot, on women - "There never was a man so near the divine as Joan of Arc. But I think, too, they can be more entirely damnable than anything that was ever breeched, for they don't stop still now and then and laugh at themselves."

On his pal Sandy Arbuthnot, "He had a pair of brown eyes like a pretty girl's"

On the impressive Enver, a Pole on the German's side - "He was a slim fellow of Rasta's build, very foppish and precise in his dress, with a smooth oval face like a girl's, and rather fine straight eyebrows."

On his pal Peter Piennar, "He had a face as gentle as a girl's."

Selective quotation can be so unfair. Make of that lot what you will.