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“... is read as an ‘upper-class’ novelist, not a Roman Catholic one, and the anguished Catholic Graham Greene is said to be ‘more deeply influenced by the pressures and limits of a particular social world than the novels would have us believe’. Louis Althusser’s essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ appeared in English in ...”

“... him. He was capable of much better stuff. In 1951, he was commissioned to write a long essay on Graham Greene, but after a month’s work told his editor he couldn’t do it because he was too immersed in Witness. The review was to have been of The End of the Affair. What a shame that he never turned it ...”

“... can write such leaden sentences as: ‘In the following decades the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene would epitomise the realism of 20th-century Catholic literature. In the meantime, Chesterton was content to let Baring and a handful of others practise the art of the Catholic novel while he concentrated on controversy.’ This makes it clear ...”

“... or another culture. Dostoevsky is also over the top, but interestingly, safely, crazily exotic. Graham Greene could do saints as well as sinners, and even include miracles, for example in The End of the Affair, but he keeps reasonably cool, Catholic and sad about it. Golding had Quakerism in his background, and occasionally he makes us think of the ...”

“... but she answers them (and she does have some answers) by writing. At first she reads books by men. Graham Greene, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘that man who wrote Heart of Darkness, whose name escapes me’.I hardly ever saw so much as a glimpse of myself in any of their books and I didn’t care to. I didn’t want to exist in books. I ...”

“... Svevo, Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth, W.G. Sebald. The method is less biographical for Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, Nadine Gordimer and others, and a long, frosty essay on Walter Benjamin engages crucial concepts thoroughly and ends in a magnificent, if ambiguous tribute: ‘From a distance, Benjamin’s magnum opus’ – The Arcades Project – ‘is ...”

“... Small wonder. The novelist who finishes his book is a different person from the one who began it, Graham Greene says: but he was thinking of a normal time-span of a year or so, not twenty. If Benengeli’s initial raison d’être was to be a parody of every chivalric ghost-writer that had ever necromantically recorded a wandering knight’s career, his ...”

“... Quiet American, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, directed by Philip Noyce, and based on Graham Greene’s novel. (It isn’t the first time the book’s been adapted for the screen: Mankiewicz made a version in 1958 which Greene, who anyway tended to have a very low opinion of films based on his ...”

“... the simple matter one might believe it to be. On the one hand, Norman Sherry in his Life of Graham Greene can remark parenthetically that ‘in 1935 it was common to call blacks “niggers”,’ thus excusing Greene’s use of the word in his story ‘The Basement Room’. There again, it is noticeable that ...”

“... mimicking (in alphabetical order, not the order of their appearance in the text) Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), C.P. Snow and Virginia Woolf. There are also allusions to other texts, such as William Golding’s Free Fall, and to literary schools and ...”

“... developed a political concern. But then, so did most of his contemporaries: look at Auden, look at Graham Greene, look at Day Lewis, Spender, Isherwood. Orwell’s whole generation was transformed by events, and Orwell simply moved with the political tide. In the process he made a reputation, and he changed: but surely any writer is a somewhat different ...”

“... red-haired Crowley is a descendant of James Joyce with the multiple-passport-wielding aura of a Graham Greene character. He was Unicef’s man in Sudan for a long time. He feels this is a crucial moment for Afghanistan and is sure that the current situation, with rising violence and troop withdrawal imminent, constitutes a potential ‘perfect ...”

“... myself again included, were convinced that no such window would be allowed to stay open for long. Graham Greene made a visit to Chile in the early Allende years and spent a good deal of time with the supporters of the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), who kept on warning that there would be a violent confrontation, engineered by the ruling class ...”

“... most admired and least autobiographical novel, The Vet’s Daughter, appeared in 1959. Graham Greene, who championed Comyns throughout her career, provided a jacket quote praising her ‘offbeat’ style and the reviews were almost unanimously enthusiastic. Some critics demurred at the narrative being not only in the first person but, it ...”

“... of astrology away from the dubious claims of prediction towards another kind of understanding. Liz Greene’s book The Astrology of Fate expounds an English version of the same process. Liz Greene, it appears, is both an astrologer and an analytical psychologist of a distinctly Jungian cast. The resultant discussion of her ...”