“... for Louise and Helen’s peace, an act almost holy in its perversity.The recondite agonies that Graham Greene inflicted on Scobie – let alone Jesus – in The Heart of the Matter (1948) repelled George Orwell. He accused Greene of being a spiritual snob, who had turned Hell into ‘a sort of high-class night ...”

“... dominated by macho violence and the cruelty of the elements. It comes with a recommendation by Graham Greene who says: ‘The story held me so completely ... I wish I had written this book.’ At first, this is a little surprising – for the adultery that triggers off the action is an ordinary American adultery, without sacrilegious or metaphysical ...”

“... Pound, who admired his combination of old-world Tory manners and avant-garde sympathies, and from Graham Greene, who imitated his techniques, notably in The End of the Affair. These writers and many others of many stripes – Herbert Read, D.H. Lawrence, Hugh Walpole, for instance – admired him because he was shrewd and helpful about the business of ...”

“... There is a great deal of Conrad in Beckett’s fiction, but also in Malraux and of course Naipaul, Graham Greene, and the remarkable Sudanese novelist el-Tayib Salih. You cannot read Conrad simply or securely. He exists, it seems, to prod and bother the reader from one uncertainty to another. The great thing, though, is that despite the withering anxiety ...”

“... Lara Feigel unravels the tangled web, concentrating on the experiences of six novelists: Bowen, Graham Greene, Henry Yorke (who wrote as Henry Green), Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann and the Austrian émigrée Hilde Spiel. The combination of danger and novelty made the times ‘an absolute gift to the writer’, as Yorke put it to ...”

“... is yielding diminishing returns. In The Untouchable, he has Victor Maskell say of the Graham Greene character, Querell: ‘He was genuinely curious about people – the sure mark of the second-rate novelist.’ It’s a good line, but a difficult motto for a writer to live by; it’s usually better to be a second-rate novelist who’s ...”

“... made over her sexy little body, her pouty mouth, her flirtatious ways. No less an authority than Graham Greene pointed out, after seeing Captain January, that she had an appeal ‘interestingly decadent’. All of this infuriates the grown-up Temple, and who can blame her? All she really did was tap her guts out in a series of well-made, unpretentious ...”

“... a quality. For all Dolores’s humane sexual superiority, The Bleeding Heart offers much of what Graham Greene once called the tough talking of the netball team. And it adopts the familiarly angry anti-patriarchal posture of enlightened, emancipated womanhood. Her son Tony ‘learned early to obey Father, and Father stands behind him now, Father ...”

“... and wishes some of his old friends were alive to visit him: Wystan Auden and Chester Kallman, Graham Greene, Allen Tate, Louis MacNeiec, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, John Braine, Mary McCarthy ... (a shade slyly, Mrs Spark, after all a director in her own way, may here be self-indulgently thinking of some of her own old pals). He meditates the ...”

“... or better still ‘perfectly round, like coins’. Mission? Off to Africa this time. But reading Graham Greene on the flight? What kind of pansy does this Boyd fellow think I am? Nasty civil war to sort out. Oil money at stake. That’s more like it. Juicy little coffee-coloured girl who turns out to be the local section head, too. Or does she? There ...”

“... ties rather than national ones (which are implied by both authors to be something of a fake). In Greene’s novel especially, the pains of being a spy, and above all the wretchedness of the separation from home and love which follows exposure, are memorably evoked. These books have been read by many people, and they are additionally famous in televised and ...”

“... the magazine’s early demise was due solely to the libel suit brought by Shirley Temple after Graham Greene, the magazine’s cinema reviewer, suggested that she knowingly flaunted her precocious sexuality. It would be nice to think that the asinine law put the magazine out of business. But it put itself out of business. Under-capitalised from the ...”

“... as Dr Goebbels. The other English writer of note to visit Cuba and to write about it is Graham Greene, the man who calls Philby his friend. He was in Havana before but not after Edna O’Brien – I believe. He used to see Castro on his way to visit General Torrijos, the late Panamanian strongman. At all events, he has been in Cuba several ...”

“... again and again, offering few new surprises. I notice that, since Burgess’s list appeared, Graham Greene has offered his round-up of the post-war greats – ten favourites not included in the BMC pantheon nor (apart from one – Under the Volcano) in Burgess’s. Where will this end? And when, oh when will somebody pick Earthly Powers! ...”

“... her local department store in Bayswater) – is one of several interesting points on which Richard Greene has nothing to say in this disappointingly flat biography. Why she did it she explained herself. It was, like so much in her life and work, the result of a famously (if productively) unhappy childhood. The Sitwells, Edith and her two younger ...”