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“... Belfast stands for boredom, frustration, suffocating routine, aborted loves and fetid pieties. Graham Greene is quoted as saying that Brian Moore is his favourite living novelist, and one can see why. All those Pelagian notions anathema to Mr Greene – that man might save himself by his own efforts, or improve his ...”

“... Oldfield features as a shy Cold Warrior with a Communist Party friend and as a ‘round-faced Graham Greene figure’, closely studied by Alec Guinness when he was preparing to become George Smiley; he ‘could never make close ties with people’. Guy Burgess was ‘always dirty and smelt’. This diary is also a love story: ‘The sun was shining ...”

“... and Corvo, Ivor Gurney and Evelyn Waugh), men whom an American can patronise a little. Graham Greene does not appear here, since Paul Fussell is suspicious of him. Greene is inclined to patronise Americans: he is one of those over-subtle Europeans, like Nabokov, to be closely interrogated in Section Two of ...”

“... Graham Greene​ started the research for what would become The Third Man (story and movie) in Vienna in February 1948, and wrote the treatment as a free-standing fiction in March and April. Carol Reed directed the Vienna location shooting (three cameramen and three crews) between October and December of that year, and finished filming at Shepperton Studios in March 1949 ...”

“... make it new if you’ve got it in you. Or if you can fake it. Burgess’s dislike (not envy) of Graham Greene, on these grounds, emerges in a couplet from Byrne: And white men go to pieces, as we’ve seen, In overlauded trash by Graham Greene. Greene achieved a bogus ...”

“... a little disturbingly, of being closer to one of those rather different pieces of master-craft by Graham Greene or Le Carré than to its own progenitors. But this resemblance is no bad sign. It indicates change and maturity, a greater toughness and naturalness. In fact, this seems to me Golding’s best book yet, compounding and refining the virtues of ...”

“... cooped up in one little island. The effect of such novels lasted well into our own century: Graham Greene has written that the stories of Rider Haggard were responsible for his lifelong interest in Africa. But for most children today, James Stephen’s prophecy of a time when ‘The Rudyards cease from kipling, and the Haggards ride no more’ has ...”

“... and of major rank – existed, to be sure, in the Twenties. Joseph Conrad had just died and Graham Greene was a young man getting published under the apologetic label of ‘entertainment’, but one glimpse of Minty shows the quality. Character is an elusive quality, but without it crime writing wouldn’t exist, any more than any other kind would ...”

“... footballers and movie stars, or even TV historians.) It wasn’t always like this. The 25-year-old Graham Greene didn’t get much for The Man Within (1929), his first novel, or rather his first published novel (he’d already had two rejected). On the back of it, however, William Heinemann offered Greene a three-book ...”

“... MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’. But ...”

“... finance: ‘You are all had. Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.’ Graham Greene hadn’t replied to the Left Review because he couldn’t make up his mind. As a Catholic he was sickened equally by Republican atrocities against nuns and priests, and by Franco’s brutal suppression of the devout Basques. But he wanted to ...”

“... latter because the Millennium celebration was thought to be quite enough. But there’s always the Graham Greene Festival, the Sherlock Holmes rave or the annual Dickens Festival in Broadstairs, which offers the treat of dozens of besuited and bonneted fictional favourites parading through the town. Nick Page has spent years searching out literature of ...”

“... an old, worn-out edition in facsimile (as they have done with, for example, the novels of Graham Greene). Then on page 2 you get ‘Only then could lie see that she had stuck a peacock’s feather above her lovely head’ instead of ‘Only then could he see’, and so it continues throughout the novel: there is pretty much a mistake per ...”

“... in the Fens that Evelyn Waugh was the greatest English novelist of his generation. Certainly Graham Greene, Henry Green and Angus Wilson thought so, although they and not he won the worldly honours Waugh would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that redoubtable holder of the Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he ...”

“... was Marcus Lowe,’ said Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in tribute to a colleague. Graham Greene was listening at the time and impaled the phrase in an essay which traps precisely the earnest fulsomeness of Hollywood speech. ‘I understand Britishers,’ Mayer went on, ‘I understand what’s required of a man they respect and get under ...”