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“... was Marcus Lowe,’ said Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in tribute to a colleague. Graham Greene was listening at the time and impaled the phrase in an essay which traps precisely the earnest fulsomeness of Hollywood speech. ‘I understand Britishers,’ Mayer went on, ‘I understand what’s required of a man they respect and get under ...”

“... an old, worn-out edition in facsimile (as they have done with, for example, the novels of Graham Greene). Then on page 2 you get ‘Only then could lie see that she had stuck a peacock’s feather above her lovely head’ instead of ‘Only then could he see’, and so it continues throughout the novel: there is pretty much a mistake per ...”

“... day, late in the afternoon, Fidel (Garcia Marquez always calls Castro ‘Fidel’ – according to Graham Greene, in Cuba only his enemies dare call him Castro) came to see him: with eyes sore or at least redder than usual. He looked haggard and his voice had not the sound of musing but the hideous frog of insomnia. ‘Son of a gun!’ said Castro as a ...”

“... in the Fens that Evelyn Waugh was the greatest English novelist of his generation. Certainly Graham Greene, Henry Green and Angus Wilson thought so, although they and not he won the worldly honours Waugh would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that redoubtable holder of the Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he ...”

“... finance: ‘You are all had. Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.’ Graham Greene hadn’t replied to the Left Review because he couldn’t make up his mind. As a Catholic he was sickened equally by Republican atrocities against nuns and priests, and by Franco’s brutal suppression of the devout Basques. But he wanted to ...”

“... latter because the Millennium celebration was thought to be quite enough. But there’s always the Graham Greene Festival, the Sherlock Holmes rave or the annual Dickens Festival in Broadstairs, which offers the treat of dozens of besuited and bonneted fictional favourites parading through the town. Nick Page has spent years searching out literature of ...”

“... House takeover? How irritating that what we want to know most about – the falling-out between Graham Greene and his nephew Graham C. Greene, which has resulted in Max Reinhardt’s launching a new list just to publish Greene oncle – came too ...”

“... alcoholic or heterodox priests appear in some of his books, Stone has frequently been compared to Graham Greene – a writer he thinks entirely ‘phony’. (The most sinister character in A Flag for Sunrise is a loud Englishman.) Like Greene, though, he is much concerned with faith, or the lack of it, and his novels ...”

“... write that: ‘It 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 ...”

“... just as we remain dubious about the value of the ‘decorative’ in the visual arts. When Graham Greene made ‘entertainments’ a separate category from the hard stuff in his production, he rammed home the point: the difference was a moral one, a difference between reading to pass the time pleasurably – that is, trivially – and reading to ...”

“... package tour’. He spends most of his time with a seedy, ageing pied noir entrepreneur out of Graham Greene called Harry, whom he meets on the train going up to Chiang Mai. Harry introduces himself as a small-time gem-smuggler down on his luck, but on the very verge of the big one. One evening he asks Nicholl to do him a favour. His Thai girlfriend ...”

“... long books – no miniature monographs like Chatwin’s on Patagonia or Rushdie’s on Nicaragua. Graham Greene spun Journey without Maps out of a few weeks’ trek into the Liberian interior, an itinerary further truncated by illness; for Voices of the Old Sea, perhaps his best travel-book, Norman Lewis hung out in a small Portuguese fishing ...”

“... the reader in his expert grip, and to keep meaning under control. They are secrets, not mysteries. Graham Greene and George Orwell may have been closer models for McEwan (I am thinking of the scene in Down and Out in Paris and London, when Orwell, in the doss-house, is woken up ‘by a dim impression of some large brown thing coming towards me. I opened ...”

“... many people’s minds, with The Third Man. No one setting a story there can elude images left by Graham Greene, Carol Reed and the gifted cinematographer Robert Krasker. At one point Kerr goes out of his way to invite comparisons, introducing the very racket which damned Harry Lime, the black market in penicillin. He is not too shy to bring in ...”

“... of these books. This is the third story by Tom Kakonis on the theme of the hunted man which Graham Greene believed to be the staple of all good thrillers. In Michigan Roll and this one the central figure is Waverley, a gambler with the card-counting memory that makes other pro’s wary of him. That first novel found him deep in Mafia trouble ...”