“... It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its anxieties and lunacies are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.As a child Henry Rider Haggard was believed to be stupid: his father told him he was destined to ...”

“... themselves to be continuous over long stretches of time – they include St Augustine and Graham Greene. The difference also works at the level of entire cultures. The question of narrative, in other words, raises the problem of what, if anything, persists over time. David Hume thought for a while that nothing did; others have proposed the soul, the ...”

“... secret proselytisers for their own work; they are all secret agents. As Pritchett says of Graham Greene’s Collected Essays, ‘let the academics weigh up, be exhaustive, or build their superstructures – the artist lives as much by his pride in his own emphasis as by what he ignores; humility is a disgrace.’ Pritchett’s judgments are emboldened by ...”

“... novel sets out to be precisely these things, and much else besides. The cover invokes Graham Greene’s name twice in praise for Bennett’s previous novels. Initially, the book’s narrator, Gillespie, seems a quintessentially Greeneian figure, so scarred by life he is incapable of commitment or feeling – a wearisomely familiar foil for the ...”

“... her thoughtless parents encumbered her at birth. King has her married to a ‘young man called James Monaco’ and this mistake is symptomatic of a certain vagueness in his approach to the subject, in that he never manages to elucidate all the myths which the lady’s posturings so insistently encouraged. Yet such an attack is indispensable if we are to ...”

“... old lady’s hands, lying idle in a lap somewhere.1 June. Coming to the end of English Pastoral, James Rebanks’s second volume. It’s harder to read than A Shepherd’s Life, with the central section about the onset of factory farming not easy to take. Thankfully, though, in his own life at any rate the tide turns and Rebanks regains his grip on ...”

“... no doubt, and well able to lend an air of fact-based authority to a short review: ‘Graham Greene will be 72 this year, and he has been publishing novels for over fifty years. The Man Within came out in 1929, in the same decade as The Waste Land, Ulysses and The Magic Mountain.’; But in a florilegium of such reviews, the reader may feel besieged by ...”

“... alphabetical order, not the order of their appearance in the text) Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), C.P. Snow and Virginia Woolf. There are also allusions to other texts, such as ...”

“... in Proust. Sex? A Dance gives full measure to the place of desire in human life. Powell credited James with ‘forcing, almost single-handed, the English novel into the status of a work of art’, but remarked that there he fell short; even The Golden Bowl was limited by a ‘chronically inadequate understanding of sexual passion as an element in human ...”

“... One of the odder political books I have read is The Abuse of Power, by James Margach, the veteran lobby correspondent of the Sunday Times. Published in 1978, the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan’. For 40 years and more, Margach had enjoyed the confidence of prime ministers ...”

“... Until recently, the art of modern biography was too little influenced by the man who invented it, James Boswell, and, even today, many of those who set out to write the lives of authors seem to be led by a suspicion that everything of interest about the subject might already have been said by the subject himself. The literary biographer is haunted by Nabokov’s stylishly defensive comment that the only biography of a writer that matters is the biography of his style ...”

“... every four New Yorkers. In the years between 1860 and 1900, the historian of science Ann Norton Greene has noted, a banker in Boston would have seen more horses than a Colorado cowboy or a Texas rancher. Cities were crowded and smelled awful: horses left about 1100 tons of manure on the streets of New York every day, along with 71,000 gallons of urine. In ...”

“... about ‘the human condition’ who were deeply influenced by him – Gide, Malraux, Camus, Graham Greene – are notably lacking in this sort of homely and instinctive expertise; they are ‘writers’ pure and simple. Conrad was certainly a born writer in one sense, and yet he might easily never have become one had he not invested his skill and training in ...”

“... of the poem, into a bearer of significance, rather in the manner of a seedy character in a Graham Greene novel, though there is, with Armitage, no sense of a formal religious ambience, even in echo. Robinson, who has hitherto been presented in the third person, speaks to us directly in the penultimate poem of the volume, and seems almost at times to merge ...”

“... canvas, and it is not even certain that his lines portraying it, which were first printed under James I, had been written by 1601 (though it has suited some critics to assert, without evidence, that they were ‘censored’). The Government prosecutors, admittedly, had good reason to emphasise the enactment of Richard’s overthrow, which they took as ...”