“... 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 ...”

“... Sontag also notes that camp taste depends – or at least it did back then, when the notion of a Graham Norton fronting prime-time television shows was unimaginable – on being shared, and constantly refined and embellished, by a coterie of the like-minded. Brainard’s art was insistently social; it served partly as a means of responding to and pleasing ...”

“... to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a quarter of a century, received two thousand from Norman Sherry. These are huge tomes. Even such a minuscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader.Hilary Spurling’s Life of ...”

“... co-opt Waugh, as it were, onto the editorial board of Scrutiny.) The book’s final selection is Graham Swift’s Last Orders. Carey writes appreciatively of the way Swift captures Cockney speech and ends powerfully: ‘If a language reflects the temper of its people, we should be proud of this book’s language – or proud of the generation, now ...”

“... to a correspondent who had theories of his own. ‘Dear Mr Riches,’ the letter says, Frank Greene, one of my nephews, was with us the other day and I told him of our discussion about ‘Will of the Mill’. He at once, without any hesitation, announced that he agreed with your reading of it. He was not content with announcing his own opinion, but ...”

“... praised by Dame Edith Sitwell (Ah those Sitwell siblings, meddling in things Cuban!) and Graham Greene and Tyrone Power. (Power wanted to write, produce and star in successive film versions of Carpentier’s Kingdom and Lost Steps but he lost the crown to a coronary.) Something peculiar happened with Carpentier and Cuba: he loved the island but ...”

“... Hamnet, of whom nothing is known beyond the poignant fact of his death at the age of 11 in 1596. Graham Holderness rises to this challenge with an eight-page meditation centred on the echo of ‘Hamnet’ in ‘Hamlet’: the names have no etymological link, but one senses their emotional assonance, to which the old theatrical tradition that Shakespeare ...”

“... anti-Communist nation. Documentation of these murky activities is predictably scarce, but we have Graham Greene’s fictional account, The Quiet American, originally published in 1955, the insights in which still bite. Greene’s narrator, Thomas Fowler, a cynical British journalist who smokes opium, keeps a teenage ...”

“... Economy was all. He did not revisit Poland to write The Colour of Blood, but used scenes from Graham Greene’s account of his visit in the 1950s. (A review of Greene’s gave him the original idea for Black Robe. He and Greene admired each other greatly.) He did not visit Haiti ...”

“... whoops. This quickly became standard and a customary feature of live shows today, particularly Graham Norton’s, with the audience readily entering into the subterfuge, knowing that they are part of the event as they would be at a pop concert. It’s not a big step, therefore, from helping the show along in this way to manipulating competition results to ...”