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“... work, like Céline’s; nor does it parade a ready-made metaphysic of gloom, like the novels of Graham Greene and Patrick White. It is not apocalyptic but dreadfully and intently domestic, like Dickens’s world of Todgers. It is divided into three parts: ‘A Head without a World’, ‘Headless World’ and ‘The World in the Head’. Kien, the ...”

“... have guessed how Welles’s performance in the big scene would alter the dynamic of the film. Graham Greene wrote the hero and the hero’s friend as Englishmen; getting Welles for Harry Lime meant taking another American for his friend Holly; and the casting of Joseph Cotten as the loyal friend could not help pointing to Citizen Kane. This prepared ...”

“... streets of Cinco de Mayo and Francisco Madero: quieter, more humdrum. It was like this when Graham Greene passed through in the 1930s, the street ‘where you can buy your clothes cheaper if you don’t care much for appearances’.In mid-January, Loy arrived in Mexico City, and there they were married on 25 January 1918. ‘We left the town ...”

“... protagonist in a novel without making a dog’s dinner out of the book? Some people, such as Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Chinua Achebe, Georges Bernanos, Kate O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer ...”

“... weaknesses of romanticism – traits he detected in many well-regarded writers: Wilde, Ford, Greene, West, even Joyce. How did he square this dislike with his admiration for Proust? He often remarked – it was one of his most characteristic sayings – that with any writer of significance, even the greatest, you always had to put up with something. In ...”

“... what he hears’. Norman Lewis’s novels about foreign lands have something in common with Graham Greene’s. He is quick to draw attention to offences committed by United States agents and the regimes they support, inclined to invite sympathy for populist or revolutionary groups inimical to American interests. Unlike ...”

“... by clichés about adolescent revolt. The first girl with whom Evelyn fell in love, Olivia Plunket Greene, was a Catholic, and it was a Waugh family theory that it was she who first turned him against his parents – as it was certainly she who first gave Alec the unkind nickname of ‘Baldhead’. The Plunket Greenes had links with a very different world from ...”

“... put in its place. Asked in a late interview how he fell away from his belief in Catholic doctrine, Graham Greene said he had been converted by arguments and he had forgotten the arguments. Something like this has happened to left liberals where freedom of speech is concerned. The last two generations were brought to see its value by arguments, and they ...”

“... came into his own as an undergraduate, writing his senior thesis on André Gide and Graham Greene under the supervision of R.P. Blackmur, while continuing his piano studies with Erich Itor Kahn, a European Jewish émigré. His parents expected him to join the family business after graduation, but he had no intention of becoming his ...”

“... Bennett’s novel sets out to be precisely these things, and much else besides. The cover invokes Graham Greene’s name twice in praise for Bennett’s previous novels. Initially, the book’s narrator, Gillespie, seems a quintessentially Greeneian figure, so scarred by life he is incapable of commitment or feeling – a wearisomely familiar foil for ...”

“... a plan which would allow business to go on while building proceeded. At the suggestion of Gordon Graham, then president of the RIBA, Lloyd’s put up money for what was in effect a limited competition – not for a design so much as for a plan of campaign. Although Lloyd’s themselves suggested a couple of names, the profession (in the form of the RIBA) was ...”

“... Sontag also notes that camp taste depends – or at least it did back then, when the notion of a Graham Norton fronting prime-time television shows was unimaginable – on being shared, and constantly refined and embellished, by a coterie of the like-minded. Brainard’s art was insistently social; it served partly as a means of responding to and pleasing ...”

“... to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a quarter of a century, received two thousand from Norman Sherry. These are huge tomes. Even such a minuscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader. Hilary Spurling’s Life of ...”

“... co-opt Waugh, as it were, onto the editorial board of Scrutiny.) The book’s final selection is Graham Swift’s Last Orders. Carey writes appreciatively of the way Swift captures Cockney speech and ends powerfully: ‘If a language reflects the temper of its people, we should be proud of this book’s language – or proud of the generation, now ...”

“... to a correspondent who had theories of his own. ‘Dear Mr Riches,’ the letter says, Frank Greene, one of my nephews, was with us the other day and I told him of our discussion about ‘Will of the Mill’. He at once, without any hesitation, announced that he agreed with your reading of it. He was not content with announcing his own opinion, but ...”