Mr. Standfast – Annotated Edition by John Buchan

Description

Mr. Standfast (1919) by John Buchan is the third novel in the Richard Hannay adventure series, following The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle.

With the Great War at its height, Hannay is ordered to return home and adopt the identity of Cornelius Brand, a gentle Quaker-ish philosopher living quietly in the English countryside — a disguise designed to smoke out the network of German spies that has infiltrated Britain and, covertly, the Allied High Command itself. His mission sweeps him from the cottages of the Cotswolds to an aerodrome in the war-stricken south, through the chaos of the Western Front in 1918, and finally to a deadly confrontation amid the high passes of the Swiss Alps. Buchan blends tense pursuit, aerial combat, secret-service intrigue, and the nightmare of industrialized warfare, while the book’s title — drawn from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, whose recurring “Mr. Standfast” motif threads through the novel — underscores its themes of endurance, loyalty, and moral steadfastness.

This DodaBooks edition presents the complete text with inline annotations that illuminate the historical background of the First World War, the geography of the Alpine operations, the literary echo of Bunyan, and the period vocabulary of Buchan’s narrative.