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“... for a priestly friend to say private Masses for his soul and as he got older edged towards a Graham Greene-like Catholicism, though without ever being formally received into the Church. It is difficult to know how seriously to take all this, to know how far it was a pose. For there was much of the poseur in Clark. He could assimilate other people’s ...”

“... vaguely reminiscent of Archie Rice in Tony Richardson’s film of The Entertainer as well as early Graham Greene. The style is distinctive in the way it wanders in and out of interiority, with private thought and public speech undifferentiated by punctuation or mise-en-page. The central character, the focalising consciousness of the novel, is the eponymous ...”

“... even when it is not the most important thing.’ New importances are established in the cancer ward, where Simon talks to his neighbour, a man ‘like a skeleton with skin stretched over it’. The thin man mockingly volunteers that ‘I learnt a new word yesterday. Do you want to hear it? Etiolation. It’s my new word.’ ‘What does it ...”

“... Graham Greene​ ’s Journey without Maps is an account of a trek he made across West Africa in 1935. He started in Sierra Leone, then a British colony, crossed through a sliver of French Guinea, and then slogged across the Liberian jungle. The walk took an entire month. Not long after leaving French Guinea, Greene was almost felled by an unidentified fever ...”

“... Four, but for the closely related cases of the Maguire family, the Birmingham Six, Judith Ward? What did it mean for the system of justice in England? Some years earlier, in a judgment in the Birmingham Six case, Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, had summed up the broader significance of such a reversal. If the six men win, it will mean that the ...”

“... there in Stein’s evocation of twisted men and violet evenings; and there’s a touch of Sheila Graham in the Garden of Allah, with Fitzgerald drunk on the floor. Kenneth Anger is deep in conversation with Nathanael West at the counter of Schwab’s drugstore, Joan Didion’s desert air is wafting in under the door, and Ben Hecht is taking notes. Stein has ...”

“... As many people have pointed out, the first of them probably being Kermode’s fierce friend Graham Hough, evil is not redeemed by scepticism but rather compounded, and we judge it to be evil by criteria which have nothing to do with belief. Yet a decent person bothered by old lies might well see the success of lying as the chief ethical issue, and ...”

“... can write such leaden sentences as: ‘In the following decades the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene would epitomise the realism of 20th-century Catholic literature. In the meantime, Chesterton was content to let Baring and a handful of others practise the art of the Catholic novel while he concentrated on controversy.’ This makes it clear enough ...”

“... online photograph from a long-ago corporate softball event in Central Park he is misidentified as Graham Herold, so there’s at least one name that can be crossed off the list of possibles. Frustrated in his new post, as administrator for various funds of the plutocratic Batros family, he drafts emails of protest and reproach that he never sends. The locus ...”

“... He thought of himself as a popular novelist, writing for a well-educated but broad audience. Graham Greene was the reader for Longmans who recommended publication of At Swim-Two-Birds and O’Nolan was ambitious for a Greene-sized readership. He sent a copy of his first novel to the popular novelist Ethel Mannin and when, unsurprisingly, she criticised ...”

“... slightly anti-semitic”. I am reminded of that wise physician, Sir Adolph Abrahams, who, on his ward-rounds at Westminster, forbade medical students to utter the word “slightly”. “Either a woman is pregnant or not pregnant,” he would say. “She cannot be slightly pregnant, boy.” ’ I have two objections to this argument. First, Sir Adolph is ...”

“... his famous parts – Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, Leo in The Go-Between, Carlyon in the film of Graham Greene’s The Man Within, the ventriloquist Maxwell Frere in Dead of Night, Jack Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest – tended to make a dark festival out of the business of being everything but the one thing specified. Trust is an actor’s ...”

“... in the de Maistre studio-salon, I met other more or less important people, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, as well as Douglas Cooper … I got to know Francis when he designed some furniture for my Eccleston Street flat. I like to remember his beautiful pansy-shaped face, sometimes with too much lipstick on it … In those days ...”

“... well aware of Wharton’s elegy, but they are not interested in the personage it describes. As the ward of Rochester’s mother, Wharton was brought up in the same house as the poet and, though she was twelve years younger, knew Rochester rather better than we or any other of the commentators on his life may be said to have done. In the months that followed ...”

“... that it was altogether too free-form. I rather wish it had been more so, and done on the lines of Graham Norton’s current TV show, so that the priest in charge could have said: ‘All sit ... but remain standing those who had any sort of fling with the deceased.’15 May. Finish reading A Pacifist’s War by Frances Partridge and start reading Stalingrad ...”