“... was a journey that ought not to have been made; it had broken my life in two.’ Graham Greene, surviving a feverish night in the Liberian interior, records a comparable epiphany: ‘I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living. I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable.’ Between Theroux’s ...”

“... the German-style version of Hesse or Grass is too instinctively metaphysical, not homespun enough. Richard Hughes was one of our most effective local magicians; John Fowles has become one; William Golding has had the status a long time. His new novel confirms him as a master craftsman in his particular sort of magic. It is beautifully constructed, it grips the ...”

“... man who escapes the nullness of life in posh London to become a scared, amateur spook in Beirut. Richard, the hero of Heart’s journey in Winter, is another ambiguous journalist-spy, this time in Cold War Germany. John Pitt’s historical moment – Iran during the Revolution – is the most dramatic of all, and his relationship with the British ...”

“... then of the poets Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, and next a line of novelists headed by Richard Wright, began the task of reclamation about two generations earlier than the Caribbean writers who identified – if one can nowadays put it that way – with Europe, specifically England. Their literary industry, centred largely in London, only really ...”

“... European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg delivered its first judgment on 1 July 1961. Gerard Richard Lawless had been arrested four years earlier while attempting to travel from Ireland to Great Britain. Under a 1940 amendment to the Irish Offences against the State Act (1939), a government minister could order the detention without trial of ‘any ...”

“... In​ 1940, James Baldwin visited the painter Beauford Delaney at his studio on Greene Street. Baldwin was fifteen and a high school student; the meeting had been arranged by a friend. ‘Beauford was the first living, walking proof, for me, that a Black man could be an artist,’ Baldwin wrote later. In Delaney, a gay black artist from Knoxville, 23 years his senior and living downtown, rather than in Harlem, Baldwin saw a possible future for himself ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The Darwin scholar, John Greene, once summarised the Darwinian revolution as the triumph of a dynamic and non-teleological structuring of nature over static, teological systems: the triumph of chance and change over design and permanence, the triumph of objectivity in the life sciences, of secularism and naturalism over clericalism and the supernatural ...”

“... loved photographers and made friends with a number of them – André de Dienes, Sam Shaw, Milton Greene – but there was little doubt among any of them that Marilyn was a self-portraitist working in collaboration. When the compositional duties fall to a painter, the result is often stunning but bereft: Marilyn isn’t there. Willem de Kooning’s 1954 oil ...”

“... band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly original, sometimes on the ...”

“... in Los Angeles, where he wrote a thesis titled ‘Myth and Symbol in the Literature of Graham Greene’.Nguyen’s narrator is designed to have several dual identities, but it’s his bond with Man and Bon that turns out to be the engine of both novels, as he tries to carry out Man’s orders, handed down from the Viet Cong, while protecting Bon from ...”

“... The other, less flattering image comes from the gathering in the Queen’s Gallery to hear Richard von Weisaecker make an address. The President of West Germany, speaking a crystalline, virtually unaccented English, spoke for about half an hour with restraint, wisdom and the quiet earnest of a man gravely engaged upon serious things. He had been ...”

“... regime largely protected from inquiring eyes by its inaccessibility and its secret police. Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul, published in 1973, was set among the exiles in Corrientes, across the Argentine frontier, but it caught very well the claustrophobic atmosphere of 20th-century Paraguay. The country’s greatest novelist, Augusto Roa Bastos, long ...”

“... that in his youth he had been attracted by the existential dilemmas treated in the fiction of Greene, Mauriac and other Catholic writers, but that in his own novels ‘I domesticated their themes to the humdrum suburban-parochial milieu that I knew best.’ This was certainly true of his fiction up to that date: the baked dusty roads of Mexico or the ...”

“... 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 ...”