“... Shirley Hazzard​ liked to tell the story of how she got to know Graham Greene. A rainy morning in the late 1960s, a café on the island of Capri. She was doing the Times crossword. Greene and his friend Michael Richey came in from Mass at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we – well, friends the merestKeep much that I resign …Yet I will but say what mere friends say,Or only a thought stronger;I will hold your hand but as long as all may –And then, according to Hazzard, Greenecould not remember the very end ...”

“... created the state of Panama, which, after a brief interlude first under Omar Torrijos (friend of Graham Greene and Gabriel García Márquez) and then under Manuel Noriega (former friend of George Bush), is now firmly back in its control. (As John Major says in the Cambridge History, the Panama Canal has been the ‘outstanding symbol of Washington’s ...”

“... say, the torments of unworthy priests or of sinners taking the sacrament unshriven, such as Graham Greene used to dramatise. Treachery, adultery, even murder are aspects of the commonplace, and matter only as parts of a world: that is, they are as a rule treated not as sins great and small but as having their value from the parts they play in the ...”

“... real secret. They soothed the optimistic Dickens with something less terrible than the truth.’ Graham Greene quoted and developed this judgment, suggesting that Dickens’s ‘truth’ is in the mystery, not the solution, in the implacable faces of Monks and Fagin peering at Oliver through the window of his secure-seeming home, so that there ‘creeps ...”

“... the Spanish-American War, what was to become a classic archetype in the hands of Hemingway and Graham Greene – the quiet spy Johnnie, a ‘little tan-faced refugee without much money’, who works undercover for American naval intelligence, and whose immensely valuable reports are in the end unused and disregarded. Crane himself liked it to be ...”

“... the wicked town of Maidenhead. I didn’t know it was wicked until later when I read the novels of Graham Greene and Patrick Hamilton. My aunt certainly wasn’t wicked. When she stepped out of the house she would usually go, not down into the town itself, but in the other direction up to what were called ‘the fields’ and on to Maidenhead Thicket. She ...”

“... habit of sending comp copies to anyone who might be interested. Kathy Acker, Gaston Bachelard, Graham Greene, Karl Popper: all responded appreciatively on receiving a Gaberbocchus in the post. Admirers were as likely to be eminently establishment as anti-establishment. Jean Dubuffet invited the Themersons for tea in Provence; the philosopher Elizabeth ...”

“... write down the people in world history that they both like: Bob Dylan (although not recently), Graham Greene, Quentin Tarantino and Tony Hancock.’ Andrew and David, it has to be said, would probably count Nick Hornby somewhere between Martin Amis and Jeffrey Archer. How to Be Good is uneven. Compared to Parsons, the smooth operator, Hornby can ...”

“... gloom to hint at larger worries than local politics, and borrow enough from such models as Graham Greene to make non-South African readers feel at home. The Good Doctor starts out efficiently and resonantly and The Imposter has a memorable foil in Canning, a creepily insinuating figure, powerful and pathetic by turns. Yet both novels are marred ...”

“... The Humbling frequently feels less like a novel than a one-liner (a very good one-liner – like a Graham Greene short story – about an actor made suicidal by his inability to act, who can kill himself only by successfully acting a suicide) interrupted by a long and pointless digression. Well, that’s life: a one-liner interrupted by a long and ...”

“... and husks, shit, bones and stray plastic scraps, picked over by rootling pigs. Seventy years ago, Graham Greene commented in Journey without Maps that ‘Freetown is like an old trading port that has been left to rot along the beach; it is a spectacle of decay.’ Here, today, you could leave out the ‘like’. To get to Bunce Island, the slave-trading ...”

“... however, Lodge was never really a religious novelist, in the manner of François Mauriac or Graham Greene. In stereotypically Catholic fashion, he has never shown much sense of religion as personal experience, which is one reason he can counterpose ‘experience’ so sharply to Catholicism. You would not turn to his fiction for enlightenment about ...”

“... and overwrought prose. ‘Carlo feels he is at the crossroads where time and eternity meet.’ Graham Greene is writhing in his grave. ‘He contemplates the nature of truth, but a definition eludes him.’ The reader is writhing in her armchair.The question is: is the book dreadful because Jennie Erdal wrote it as Naim Attallah, or because Jennie ...”

“... at the end of his Introduction, that the greatest marvels are to be found at home. Did not Graham Greene once say that the saddest poster in the world was one which read: ‘BOAC get you there, and then bring you back’? But Greene, as anyone can see, was a Ulysses of the Dantean phase, with an unappeasable ...”

“... have died in Heriot Row. ‘How well I remember her lifting me out of bed,’ he told his cousin Graham Balfour, ‘carrying me to the window, and showing me one or two lit windows up in Queen Street across the dark belt of gardens; where also, we told each other, there might be sick little boys and their nurses waiting, like us, for the morning.’In Night ...”