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“... Oh, and he also called his wife ‘Filth’, or ‘Philth’. ‘She’s hipposexual,’ he told Graham Greene. You can make your own judgment about all this. Actually, if you’ve read the poems, you probably will already have made your own judgment. To crack open Betjeman’s famously bestselling Collected Poems – ‘the publishing phenomenon of ...”

“... and a cigarette holder. The boredom was partly a generational thing. Evelyn Waugh, b. 1903; Graham Greene, b. 1904; Cyril Connolly, b. 1903; Ian Fleming, b. 1908. These Englishmen came from a similar class background, and had writing careers which, from the outside at least, seemed characterised by brilliant success. They also had parallel lives as ...”

“... for a priestly friend to say private Masses for his soul and as he got older edged towards a Graham Greene-like Catholicism, though without ever being formally received into the Church. It is difficult to know how seriously to take all this, to know how far it was a pose. For there was much of the poseur in Clark. He could assimilate other ...”

“... into the future. Despite many witty passages, it is not one of her better novels, its style, as Graham Greene observed, being ‘rather consciously spangled with felicities’ (it was published in Britain by William Heinemann). The Hogarth Press’s refusal of Tandem became a stimulus for Violet’s next novel, Broderie anglaise, which she wrote in ...”

“... had created an existential Eastern European Untermensch who could almost have jumped ship from Graham Greene or Darkness at Noon, where men in uniform appear as ghosts. But the mood and its placement are really its own. Some novelists wouldn’t dare to, and wouldn’t know how, but Ascherson must be credited for a quite vertiginous marrying of ...”

“... in a preface that the stimulus for Black Robe came originally from reading the Collected Essays of Graham Greene. Notwithstanding historical research and the intervention of Greene, this modern missionary tale seems no less written to a formula than its 19th-century predecessors. Vividly and conscientiously-imagined ...”

“... was P.H. Newby’s in 1951, which offered the understatement that Hartley was ‘quieter’ than Graham Greene, but that he had no situation or character which had been ‘accepted at secondhand from another book’. Greene, like many other authors of his time, had no characters that ...”

“... and benign, cropping up in a Western. ‘He has a lot in common with Ronald Reagan,’ commented Graham Greene, who had been a close friend of Paul VI but, significantly, never received an overture from John Paul: ‘They are both world leaders who were in fact just actors.’ Greene had a dream in which he opened a ...”

“... Claud was sent to school at Berkhamstead. The headmaster during the First World War was Charles Greene, father of Graham and a high-minded radical, and Cockburn first saw political violence on Armistice Day, when a drunken mob burst into the school accusing Greene (quite wrongly) of ...”

“... about ‘the human condition’ who were deeply influenced by him – Gide, Malraux, Camus, Graham Greene – are notably lacking in this sort of homely and instinctive expertise; they are ‘writers’ pure and simple. Conrad was certainly a born writer in one sense, and yet he might easily never have become one had he not invested his skill and ...”

“... with the Gospel of St John, mingling (as Lewis put it) the probable and the marvellous. Like Graham Greene, he worked best when he was putting his spiritual concerns into the form of popular fiction. Human beings are glimpsed in the light of an eternity that is not so much their background as their proper place. The novels rely on stock figures ...”

“... of returning to Catholicism; it provided a route to absolution.’ It also provided a route to Graham Greene land. Barker discussed the situation with Anais Nin, who opined that he needed ‘more crucifixions than resurrections’, to which he added the rider that ‘we repeat the crucifixion over and over ... because we did not accomplish it ...”

“... her dealings with the English (including her courtship of Virginia Woolf and her friendship with Graham Greene, who dedicated The Honorary Consul to her). But the Prince stayed in her Buenos Aires flat only for one evening, and he was still, no doubt, aching after a fall from his horse as he was progressing in state from Parliament to Government ...”

“... see page 12). Or compare, again, with Waugh’s own report of the dire disorder which overtook Graham Greene in a New York hotel, when his lap began filling with blood. Had he, too, burst? Well, not exactly; there’s an explanation of sorts on page 106. At one point, the two teases fall out. Mitford, who is writing pieces about France for Ian Fleming ...”

“... hair and prominent teeth’. Description of scenery has that careful enigmatic ordinariness that Graham Greene does better: ‘She had opened a latticed Moorish door to the small sunny courtyard outside and moved her chair to sit beside it. An olive tree grew from the dry soil in the middle of the court. Two thirsty-looking potted orange trees sat on ...”