The most forceful exponent of what might be termed the public school ethos in literature was, I think, a Scotsman called John Buchan. He had been to a grammar school himself, but Scottish schools of the better sort had long had a more intellectual tradition than English ones. Having gone on to Oxford, Buchan then joined the imperial enterprise in its most stylized form, as a member of what was termed Lord Milner's ‘kindergarten’, the group of young men who worked under Milner and went on themselves to similar exalted positions in the Empire.

Milner, who governed South Africa, surrounded himself with bright young men, generally not aristocrats but those who had graduated through a public school and Oxbridge education into the ruling class. Buchan ended up his most famous product, as a writer who propagated the ethos and also as Governor General of Canada, the office he held when he died. Interestingly enough, he did his best during his tenure to assert a Canadian identity, albeit in the context of the wider British Empire. And he was one of the early proponents of a Scottish Parliament, suggesting that he had understood well that Empire, like the British ruling class, would flourish when it was not restrictive. He was a great proponent of multiculturalism and pluralism, though whether this would have extended to those with skin of a different colour, as Paul Scott was to characterize later the hump that many imperialists could never get over (when the British missionary Edwina Crane realizes, in ‘The Jewel in the Crown’, that Christian ideals of human equality yielded to colour prejudices), is not a question that can be answered readily.