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“... was a bit obsessive about it. Tolstoy describes a rather special case in The Kreutzer Sonata and Graham Greene another in The End of the Affair. There is Herzog, and there must be more. But it seems almost as rare as duelling, which, still important in Richardson, crops up anachronistically in Flaubert, and even more so in Wyndham Lewis. Wronged spouses ...”

“... like space debris, more than enough free-floating material to pad out tome after fresh tome on Graham Greene, or George Orwell, or P.G. Wodehouse, or Evelyn Waugh, or Bernard Shaw, or Cyril Connolly? Must we prepare our shelves for yet another cache of letters, stumbled across like Dead Sea scrolls, every decade? If so, will they, too, rank high with ...”

“... not class or intellect, and the rewards for bravery were blood (other people’s) and diamonds. Graham Greene said that he valued Haggard’s book ‘a good deal higher than Treasure Island’.The story follows the narrator Allan Quatermain – an elephant hunter with good manners – and his colleagues, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, on a journey ...”

“... who feel themselves to be continuous over long stretches of time – they include St Augustine and Graham Greene. The difference also works at the level of entire cultures. The question of narrative, in other words, raises the problem of what, if anything, persists over time. David Hume thought for a while that nothing did; others have proposed the ...”

“... for self-contained affirmation within a world of dreams. Victor Baxter, the fictitious narrator of Graham Greene’s The Captain and the Enemy, is a lot less sanguine about his – abortive – literary career; he has no literary prizes to flagellate himself for winning in the manner of the en-Nobelled White. Victor is a sorry figure all round. His mother ...”

“... in wartime, despite the rediscovery of patriotism by the British intelligentsia. Cecil Day Lewis, Graham Greene and George Orwell all undertook patriotic work for the BBC or for the Ministry of Information, and led the new celebration of British culture. As E.M. Forster declared in 1940, it now appeared that this culture was ‘genuinely ...”

“... the first collection of novellas, The trouble I’ve seen (1936), received generous praise from Graham Greene and H.G. Wells. For years, her literary standing was compromised by her ties to Ernest Hemingway in the Thirties and Forties. This has long since ceased to be the case. The Face of War, her collected war reporting, is one of the most readable ...”

“... likelihood and importance? It is in Narayan’s style that the secret lies, the style of which Graham Greene said: ‘After the death of Evelyn Waugh, Narayan is the stylist I most admire.’ Economy is, of course, its salient feature: ‘While writing, I prefer to keep such details to a minimum in order to save my readers the bother of ...”

“... another pastiche, sometimes of Gissing, sometimes of Riceyman Steps, or of the seedy manner of Graham Greene but without the pain. If the novel finds more sympathetic reviewers, they may well describe it as post-modernist, but it is so only in the mode of that retro-post-modernism that is pre-modern, at a loss for no words but new ones. At the end of ...”

“... was manufactured in large quantities. Despite a quotation from Vile Bodies and references to Graham Greene, George Orwell and J.B. Priestley, this section is a testament to the inadequacy of written sources, on their own, when researching matters as elusive as the likely ambience in which radio programmes were heard. At one extreme, Scannell and ...”

“... vaguely reminiscent of Archie Rice in Tony Richardson’s film of The Entertainer as well as early Graham Greene. The style is distinctive in the way it wanders in and out of interiority, with private thought and public speech undifferentiated by punctuation or mise-en-page. The central character, the focalising consciousness of the novel, is the ...”

“... and Dickens, cheerfulness is quite as real as gloom, which isn’t the case with Sebald or Graham Greene. Suffering for them is fundamental in a way that bliss can’t be, and certainly easier to knock a story out of. For the modern age, there is, many would say, something phony about the very idea of happiness. Even the word has a naff ring to ...”

“... held it back for three or four years) encouraged a spate of ‘grimly honest’ realist dramas. As Graham Greene remarked of one of them, the colliery winding gear, silhouetted against the sky, the pit disaster and the warning siren became as cinematically familiar as the Eiffel Tower or the Houses of Parliament. A.J. Cronin, the best-selling novelist ...”

“... can leach the life out of any presumptuous rewriting, converting it into so much anaemic homage. Graham Greene tells us that in his apprentice days he found The Heart of Darkness so overwhelming an influence that he had to give up reading Conrad altogether. Nevertheless, Greene went on to write The Heart of the ...”

“... the back of the jacket confuse the trail just as much. Someone at Century thought it worth getting Graham Greene and Iris Murdoch to write them, and both have come up with deadweight little bits. Greene: ‘The reader will be well rewarded by a strange experience.’ Murdoch: ‘It is essentially about love of art as a ...”