Buchan wrote Greenmantle in 1916 while running British wartime propaganda. The novel is about British agents disrupting a German-backed jihad in the Middle East. It is very much a product of its moment and some of it has aged very badly.

What hasn’t aged is the pace. Buchan understood that momentum is a form of argument — that if a story moves fast enough, the reader stops questioning it.

— G. H. Schreiber

18/01/2026