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“... the world of her husband. She became, once again, a Belfast girl, and her talk was no longer of Graham Greene and Aldous Huxley, but of Mrs Conroy’s operation. Like to like. In later years my father’s veneer wore thinner and thinner. His terrible failures undermined his pretences: he never finished his doctorate, he never wrote his book. He never ...”

“... I received the letter telling me how to get to my first posting. It read like something out of a Graham Greene novel. I was to purchase a second-class rail ticket and travel to Glasgow, staying overnight at the Seamen’s Mission. From there I was to take the local train to Girvan, a ferry to the island of Arran, and in ever-diminishing steps involving ...”

“... and Conrad, who are much more powerful (though powerfully negative) influences on Bennett than Graham Greene, with whom he is routinely compared. Novelistic representations of revolutionaries tend to be ironised, or else implicitly demonstrate the insufficiency of individual vengeance or sexual desire as motives to achieve political transformation. A ...”

“... and Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance. For the Singapore sections, he reread a fair amount of Graham Greene. The idea of a man whose life is changed by an operation on his face was inspired by the John Frankenheimer thriller Seconds, in which John Randolph is given a new identity – turned into Rock Hudson – by a shadowy organisation. The gory ...”

“... been at work. With Steinbeck one can guess what the factors were. Europeans have always had what Graham Greene called a ‘fetish’ about him. It was a lucky stroke that The Grapes of Wrath – with its broad sentimentality about endurance under intolerable pressure – was published in England in the month that war was declared. Scandinavians have a ...”

“... and statements about truth. The other day I came across a long forgotten interview I did with Graham Greene in 1963. Speaking of The End of the Affair, he said that he had made ‘an appalling mistake’ in that novel, and the mistake was ‘the introduction of something which had not got a natural explanation’. He found it impossible to carry on ...”

“... mediocre, so the line between sainthood and damnation was perilously thin. One might call it the Graham Greene syndrome. Satan was said to be most powerful in the monasteries, while many holy men and women fell into raptures and trances, had visions and hallucinations, fasted for long periods and demonstrated an ability to speak languages with which ...”

“... under the name Bernard Mara, and there are times in the later work when he can sound like Graham Greene on speed, exploring, as Greene did, the subgenre of the thrillemma or dilemmer, thrillers grounded on a moral dilemma: The Statement, The Colour of Blood, The Lies of Silence all operate in this mode. Given ...”

“... In​ 1926, Graham Greene received a diagnosis of epilepsy. In all likelihood, he didn’t have the disorder. His only symptoms were three isolated episodes of lost consciousness: once in the school chapel at Berkhamsted; once in the London home of his psychoanalyst; and once in the offices of the Times, where he was working as an assistant editor ...”

“... Vine/Rendell, I have to admit that I find the use of two names about as helpful as the distinction Graham Greene used to draw between his ‘Novels’ and his ‘Entertainments’ – which is to say, not very helpful at all.) Scott Turow’s first novel, Presumed Innocent, was a colossal hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Copies were getting up off the ...”

“... explore a far-flung, outlandish place and report the experience in one of the styles patented by Graham Greene, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin and Robert Byron. The scholarly version of these explorations is called anthropology, as in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Margaret Mead, and many American scholars in receipt of sabbatical leave and ...”

“... books written for lay audiences and so designated in apparent imitation of Graham Greene – have been enormously popular: titles such as Uses and Abuses of Psychology, Sense and Nonsense in Psychology, and Know your own IQ have sold literally millions of copies. Wilheim Wundt, the most prolific psychological writer of the last ...”

“... II, speak more vividly than can those of the self-centred, sin-and-salvation-centred characters of Graham Greene, precisely because they are anchored in both ancient and modern history, with its migrations and regenerating mixtures. All the books I have mentioned are large partly because they are packed with specialised knowledge. Pynchon, as Frank ...”

“... and their relationship to the business of writing; it was also about the ‘chip of ice’ that Graham Greene said exists in every writer’s heart. This chip is often talked about – and mentions of it on the part of writers are usually either a form of boasting or a plea for special treatment – but it isn’t often made to seem real. The ...”

“... only recent Anglo-Saxon novelist to make much of it, and perhaps here he has been led astray by Graham Greene. The writing of his Argentina-based The Honorary Consul at times appears to be taken over by one of the book’s least convincing characters (and there is stiff competition for that), the appalling folclorico novelist Dr Saavedra, who would ...”