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“... topics, it sometimes seems, that don’t come with an appropriate anecdote about Somerset Maugham. Graham Greene – who succeeded him as the world’s world-weariest traveller – complained that no one had done more ‘to stamp the idea of the repressed prudish man of God on the popular imagination’. V.S. Naipaul – who succeeded ...”

“... the grave. Waiting in the wings is a book by him about Ursula, entitled Style, which, according to Graham Greene, who was sent the manuscript, might be edited for publication. There may be a cult in the making – and one could imagine a film by Antonioni, whose scriptwriter, Mark Peploe, was intrigued by J. Behrens in his last days. Ursula’s life ...”

“... I wrote a novel, like everybody wrote a novel, luckily its unfindable by anyone. A poor man’s Graham Greene. Who wants to be that? Although he did write one of the best books of the 20th century.AS: What’s that?TP: The Quiet American. There are four great short 20th-century novels. The Quiet American. Heart of Darkness. Death in Venice. The Turn of ...”

“... ending in a bulging-eyed, haunted stare as he repeats ‘Must … don’t want to … must.’ Graham Greene rightly said that one feels ‘an overwhelming pity’ for him. After this, it was no wonder that his Hollywood career was something of a let-down, or that casting directors were hung up on the idea that he had to play creeps. Late in life he ...”

“... Graham Greene​ ’s Journey without Maps is an account of a trek he made across West Africa in 1935. He started in Sierra Leone, then a British colony, crossed through a sliver of French Guinea, and then slogged across the Liberian jungle. The walk took an entire month. Not long after leaving French Guinea, Greene was almost felled by an unidentified fever ...”

“... in other words, for Maschler. For the best part of two decades, Maschler and his colleague Graham C. Greene kept Cape independent: their faith in the company ‘never wavered. Neither of them ever sold a share.’ Finally, Maschler came to an arrangement with his American friend Bill Gottlieb at Random House. There ...”

“... of fiction. A number of facts may be checked. It is a fact, as Peterley writes, that in 1937 Graham Greene was chosen to edit an English imitation of the New Yorker called Night and Day, and it is a percipient comment, in view of the coming success of Horizon and the brief existence of Night and Day, that Cyril Connolly’s talent might have better ...”

“... Somerset Maugham’s own failure in organising a network. The spy-master has been degraded by Graham Greene into a shabby down-at-heel anonymous creature who will identify an innocent colleague with the mole he is hunting and kill the wrong man. For him Philby and Co are the modern equivalents of heroic Jesuit priests plotting against Elizabeth. In ...”

“... uninvestigated, even by people who claim to be writing biographies. For Lord Rochester’s Monkey, Graham Greene began by collecting documentary evidence and ended many years later by writing Rochester into his own scenario of sin and redemption. Later biographers have investigated even less and over-interpreted even more. The man, John Wilmot, scion of ...”

“... Priestley’s weekly broadcasts drew audiences of between 30 and 40 per cent of the population. Graham Greene, no admirer of Priestley as a novelist, declared him second only to Churchill as a national leader. His success made him vain and hard to manage, but the BBC hired him for a second series early in 1941. His demands in these broadcasts that a ...”

“... Cold-hearted, devious and supposedly a good chap, Philby has never appealed to me any more than Graham Greene does, who was his friend and admirer. It’s ironical that even after his departure for Moscow Philby was always more sympathetically treated by journalists because he was a journalist himself, supposedly a good sort and of course he wasn’t ...”

“... for. Greatly admired in its foreign language editions by the likes of Camus, Bertrand Russell and Graham Greene, Silone’s work did not have the same success with Italian critics when published there after the war. Pugliese chides them for short-sightedness, the consequence, he implies, of Communist or Fascist affiliations. Those who did appreciate ...”

“... you might be forgiven for thinking she was mostly in Barcelona for the tapas. In one of the most Graham Greene-ish moments in that book, Orwell describes how Eileen intercepted him before he could be arrested. He turns her into a kind of helpful ancillary Bond girl who gets our hero out of a scrape – and there is a faint flavour of the Boy’s Own ...”

“... out of the Foreign Office – but then again, those other celebrity spies, Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene, were equally close-lipped about what they actually did in the war. Shipton’s job, whatever it was, ended in October 1942. He walked out again, and in December 1942 married Diana Channer, one of the more patient of his many girl-friends, in ...”

“... that overrides all other categorical imperatives. We see it in Racine, in Wuthering Heights, in Graham Greene, in Les Liaisons dangereuses, in Love in the Time of Cholera – love as a terminal illness. In contrast, we may consider the nous of Auden: ‘we meet romantically passionate engaged couples, but never a couple of whom we can say that their ...”