It’s strange how myths about people accumulate and persist. John Buchan, for example, is perceived as an anti-Semitic, imperialistic and bigoted writer, whereas it became clear in Frederick Forsyth on John Buchan on Radio Four last week (Thursday) that he wasn’t at all. Forsyth set out to demonstrate that by the standards of the time Buchan was pretty liberal and something of a polymath: novelist, biographer, poet, journalist, barrister, MP and governor-general of Canada.

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In this interesting story of Buchan’s life - a Unique production for the network -it emerged that he owed his prodigious output of 100 books to a childhood accident in which a horse and cart ran over his head. His period of recuperation turned him from being an active, almost wild outdoor boy growing up in the Borders into a studious, reflective reader. By his late teens he’d read most of Shakespeare and the classics. He wrote his first book while at Glasgow university and had published five by the time he left Oxford. There, he was considered a future prime minister. He was, as Forsyth pointed out, a man driven by the Calvinist work ethic - his father was a Presbyterian minister in Scotland.

It’s true he believed in the Empire and saw it as beneficial to the natives, but most people did in the early part of the last century. It was only much later that the Left made imperialism such a dirty word. One can’t help thinking that the doomed Africa of today could do with a bit of the old Empire. Does anyone, apart from Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, believe that the deranged Robert Mugabe is an improvement on Ian Smith? And was Buchan anti-Semitic? Well, it’s a long time since I’ve read any of his novels, but some of his characters would have uttered anti-Semitic sentiments common at the time. It didn’t mean that he was anti-Jewish and indeed his great friend was Chaim Weizmann, the founder of modern Israel. Forsyth thought that the views of some of Buchan’s writing contemporaries were hair-raising compared with his.

Most of us remember Buchan for bestselling thrillers such as The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), filmed at least twice, I believe, but many of his books were biographies. The writer and academic Christopher Hitchens said that when he was young Buchan’s novels taught him to read proper book-length books. The villains in the thrillers weren’t Jews but the German High Command. After losing close friends in the first world war, he came to believe that the war was wicked. When he entered Parliament, he wasn’t really a tame party man, choosing to align himself with liberal Tories such as Harold Macmillan and Bob Boothby. Some saw him, a thriller writer, as a bridge between the Imperial novels of Henty, Kipling and others and the later writers, Greene, Fleming and le Carré. He was held in such high esteem that when, as Lord Tweedsmuir, he died in 1940 there was a state funeral for him in Canada and a memorial service at Westminster Abbey.

It’s not easy conveying landscape on radio; you need more than a good command of words and not everyone pulls it off. This is why I tend not to listen regularly to Clare Balding’s series, Ramblings, on Radio Four (Fridays). Last week she was in an area I know well, the Cranborne Chase that straddles the Wiltshire- Dorset border before flattening into the coastal plain. She accompanied an ex-soldier, James Crowden, now a writer, who lives there tending sheep, it seems. Some people spell Cranborne differently, by including a ‘u’ after the the ‘o’, but I prefer the spelling I’ve used, after Cranborne village and the name of one of the Cecil family titles.

Somehow, the majesty and beauty of the Chase, with its undulating hills, lush hollows and dramatic amphitheatres formed by the Downs, didn’t really come across to me in this programme. At its highest point, Win Green Hill, you can see across four counties - Wiltshire, Dorset, Hampshire and Somerset - and even the top of the Salisbury Cathedral spire, shining white in the sun, is visible on a clear day. Crowden described the curve of the Downs as ‘quite voluptuous’, which is the nearest we got to a vivid evocation, though Balding did accurately say that standing on Win Green was like being on top of the world. Not all is tranquility and harmony, of course. The north-south traffic constantly increases. In their part of the walk only one of nine dairy farmers remains and only the wealthy can afford to buy houses, this being the story of southern England generally. But until John Prescott notices it, the Chase will remain arguably the most quintessentially English landscape there is.