“... you might be forgiven for thinking she was mostly in Barcelona for the tapas. In one of the most Graham Greene-ish moments in that book, Orwell describes how Eileen intercepted him before he could be arrested. He turns her into a kind of helpful ancillary Bond girl who gets our hero out of a scrape – and there is a faint flavour of the Boy’s Own ...”

“... out of the Foreign Office – but then again, those other celebrity spies, Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene, were equally close-lipped about what they actually did in the war. Shipton’s job, whatever it was, ended in October 1942. He walked out again, and in December 1942 married Diana Channer, one of the more patient of his many girl-friends, in ...”

“... that overrides all other categorical imperatives. We see it in Racine, in Wuthering Heights, in Graham Greene, in Les Liaisons dangereuses, in Love in the Time of Cholera – love as a terminal illness. In contrast, we may consider the nous of Auden: ‘we meet romantically passionate engaged couples, but never a couple of whom we can say that their ...”

“... Fields of the Lord is a conventional adventure story, comparable to works by Conrad, Maugham and Graham Greene, as reviewers – friendly and hostile – pointed out at the time. Matthiessen’s next four novels were more ambitious, both formally and in scale. Far Tortuga (1975) grew out of a New Yorker assignment to visit the turtle fishermen of the ...”

“... work, like Céline’s; nor does it parade a ready-made metaphysic of gloom, like the novels of Graham Greene and Patrick White. It is not apocalyptic but dreadfully and intently domestic, like Dickens’s world of Todgers. It is divided into three parts: ‘A Head without a World’, ‘Headless World’ and ‘The World in the Head’. Kien, the ...”

“... have guessed how Welles’s performance in the big scene would alter the dynamic of the film. Graham Greene wrote the hero and the hero’s friend as Englishmen; getting Welles for Harry Lime meant taking another American for his friend Holly; and the casting of Joseph Cotten as the loyal friend could not help pointing to Citizen Kane. This prepared ...”

“... streets of Cinco de Mayo and Francisco Madero: quieter, more humdrum. It was like this when Graham Greene passed through in the 1930s, the street ‘where you can buy your clothes cheaper if you don’t care much for appearances’.In mid-January, Loy arrived in Mexico City, and there they were married on 25 January 1918. ‘We left the town ...”

“... protagonist in a novel without making a dog’s dinner out of the book? Some people, such as Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Chinua Achebe, Georges Bernanos, Kate O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer ...”

“... weaknesses of romanticism – traits he detected in many well-regarded writers: Wilde, Ford, Greene, West, even Joyce. How did he square this dislike with his admiration for Proust? He often remarked – it was one of his most characteristic sayings – that with any writer of significance, even the greatest, you always had to put up with something. In ...”

“... what he hears’. Norman Lewis’s novels about foreign lands have something in common with Graham Greene’s. He is quick to draw attention to offences committed by United States agents and the regimes they support, inclined to invite sympathy for populist or revolutionary groups inimical to American interests. Unlike ...”

“... by clichés about adolescent revolt. The first girl with whom Evelyn fell in love, Olivia Plunket Greene, was a Catholic, and it was a Waugh family theory that it was she who first turned him against his parents – as it was certainly she who first gave Alec the unkind nickname of ‘Baldhead’. The Plunket Greenes had links with a very different world from ...”

“... put in its place. Asked in a late interview how he fell away from his belief in Catholic doctrine, Graham Greene said he had been converted by arguments and he had forgotten the arguments. Something like this has happened to left liberals where freedom of speech is concerned. The last two generations were brought to see its value by arguments, and they ...”

“... came into his own as an undergraduate, writing his senior thesis on André Gide and Graham Greene under the supervision of R.P. Blackmur, while continuing his piano studies with Erich Itor Kahn, a European Jewish émigré. His parents expected him to join the family business after graduation, but he had no intention of becoming his ...”

“... Bennett’s novel sets out to be precisely these things, and much else besides. The cover invokes Graham Greene’s name twice in praise for Bennett’s previous novels. Initially, the book’s narrator, Gillespie, seems a quintessentially Greeneian figure, so scarred by life he is incapable of commitment or feeling – a wearisomely familiar foil for ...”

“... a plan which would allow business to go on while building proceeded. At the suggestion of Gordon Graham, then president of the RIBA, Lloyd’s put up money for what was in effect a limited competition – not for a design so much as for a plan of campaign. Although Lloyd’s themselves suggested a couple of names, the profession (in the form of the RIBA) was ...”