Admirers of John Buchan and his voluminous work—which includes The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, and other writings—will not find in this book much that broadens their understanding of him as a writer. But as the subtitle suggests, they will probably learn much that they never knew, because it has never been so comprehensively assessed, about his career as a public servant—specifically his occupation of the curious post of governor general of Canada in the critical period of 1935 to 1940.

Not many American readers, and not even most Canadian readers, would be aware of the evolution of that post. It began as a colonial governorship vested with effectively autocratic powers to operate the government and ignore the legislature, to (as Canada’s contribution to the great political changes of 1848, which saw Metternich and Louis-Philippe sent packing) the constitutional chief of state with an autonomous democratic parliament in domestic matters, but a representative of the British government in foreign policy (i.e. with the United States), up to the Confederation and autonomy of Canada in 1867. Thereafter, the governor general represented the British monarch as chief of state in the monarch’s absence, and no reigning British monarch set foot in Canada until 1939. Canada executed a long and intricate achievement of complete autonomy from Britain, while retaining Britain’s unconditional guarantee of Canada opposite the United States, which as late as Theodore Roosevelt did not accept the permanence or legitimacy of Canada as a distinct entity (that is, distinct