Sir Walter Bullivant Sir Walter Bullivant Sir Walter Bullivant is a fictional character created by the Scottish thriller writer John Buchan for his series of novels featuring the spy Richard Hannay. He plays small but significant roles in both "The Thirty-Nine Steps" and "Greenmantle". Sir Walter is a senior mandarin at the Foreign Office in the years leading up to World War I. He is the archetypal spymaster — gruff, acutely conscious of his duty, yet thoughtful and kindly towards those he sends into peril. In "Greenmantle", he recruits Hannay to perform a dangerous mission in the East as the Great Game heats
Patrick Hannay the upper portion and the author's portrait below. Each of the five parts has a separate title-page. "The Nightingale", a poem in stanzas of sixteen lines, has a dedication to the Duchess of Lennox and commendatory verse by Robert Hannay, John Marshall, William Lithgow and others. ‘Sheretine and Mariana,’ a graceful narrative poem in six-line stanzas, is dedicated to the Countess of Bedford. Before the "Songs and Sonnets" there is a dedicatory epistle to a soldier under whom Hannay had served abroad, Sir Andrew Gray. In 1632 a copy of commendatory verses by him was prefixed to the first collected