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“... of a Washington restaurant. Snake populations are almost everywhere in decline – which is why Harry Greene has set out to improve their image and enhance their appeal. On a geological timescale, snakes are a modern – even post-modern – phenomenon, first appearing in the fossil record about 95 million years ago in the Mesozoic era, during which ...”

“... die ‘when cruel old campaigners win safe through’. Epitaphs apart, what will survive of Graham Greene? Not love, certainly; nor the famously tortured guerrilla of Roman Catholicism, fighting and writing for and against the Church from inside and outside it, and all the more effective a partisan and publicist on its behalf when he seemed most spectacularly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tour’. He spends most of his time with a seedy, ageing pied noir entrepreneur out of Graham Greene called Harry, whom he meets on the train going up to Chiang Mai. Harry introduces himself as a small-time gem-smuggler down on his luck, but on the very verge of the big one. One ...”

“... For most of his professional life, Graham Greene might have been described as the Greta Garbo of modern English letters. He preferred to be alone. A wartime Penguin edition of England made me in my possession records on the back cover that ‘he … has always lived a quiet life and shunned literary circles.’ Widely regarded as, in Hugh Walpole’s words (quoted on the same cover), ‘the finest English novelist of his generation’, he avoided the public exposure that usually accompanies such exalted cultural status ...”

“... 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 contract that ...”

“... Graham Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926, after coming down from Oxford, allegedly on ‘intellectual’ grounds, though it also conveniently meant he was eligible to marry Vivien Dayrell-Browning, whom he had met as an undergraduate when she was working in Blackwell’s bookshop. His adoptive faith didn’t begin to manifest itself very strongly in his writings, however, for another dozen years ...”

“... For all Dolores’s humane sexual superiority, The Bleeding Heart offers much of what Graham Greene once called the tough talking of the netball team. And it adopts the familiarly angry anti-patriarchal posture of enlightened, emancipated womanhood. Her son Tony ‘learned early to obey Father, and Father stands behind him now, Father ...”

“... three parts. So is One for My Baby. Readers may recall that the narrator of Man and Boy was called Harry, and he was a producer on a TV talk-show. His wife, Gina, left him and went to work in Tokyo. The narrator of One for My Baby is called Alfie (Parsons seems to be paying homage to characters played by Michael Caine). Alfie’s wife is called Rose. Rose dies ...”

“... who used him as they liked but enjoyed his ambience (Jack Warner, Samuel Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Harry Cohn); warmer if not closer friendships with Cocteau and Renoir, Hemingway and Sinatra; and the frequent company of younger men in theatre and the movies who emulated him (Kenneth Tynan, Peter Bogdanovich). All this is known to Conrad, but the subject of ...”

“... as Dr Goebbels. The other English writer of note to visit Cuba and to write about it is Graham Greene, the man who calls Philby his friend. He was in Havana before but not after Edna O’Brien – I believe. He used to see Castro on his way to visit General Torrijos, the late Panamanian strongman. At all events, he has been in Cuba several times all ...”

“... of the performances put on before Elizabeth I at Kenilworth, 12 miles from Stratford, in 1575. Harry Goldingham, the actor who played Arion, apologetically tore off his costume and revealed his true identity in a way that’s very like Snug the joiner’s declaration ‘that I as Snug the joiner am/A lion fell.’ There are moments, though, when the ...”

“... people’s minds, with The Third Man. No one setting a story there can elude images left by Graham Greene, Carol Reed and the gifted cinematographer Robert Krasker. At one point Kerr goes out of his way to invite comparisons, introducing the very racket which damned Harry Lime, the black market in penicillin. He is not too ...”

“... figure. Whether sexual or maternal, love can be more touching as a joke than as a tragedy. Harry Hartley, Leslie’s father, was a remarkable man for whom his son always had the greatest respect and affection. Like the character drawn from him in The Brickfield he was ‘nobody’s fool’; and though a working solicitor and a shrewd businessman he ...”

“... 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 having been ‘anti-war’. But the ...”