“... Vine/Rendell, I have to admit that I find the use of two names about as helpful as the distinction Graham Greene used to draw between his ‘Novels’ and his ‘Entertainments’ – which is to say, not very helpful at all.) Scott Turow’s first novel, Presumed Innocent, was a colossal hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Copies were getting up off the ...”

“... II, speak more vividly than can those of the self-centred, sin-and-salvation-centred characters of Graham Greene, precisely because they are anchored in both ancient and modern history, with its migrations and regenerating mixtures. All the books I have mentioned are large partly because they are packed with specialised knowledge. Pynchon, as Frank ...”

“... explore a far-flung, outlandish place and report the experience in one of the styles patented by Graham Greene, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin and Robert Byron. The scholarly version of these explorations is called anthropology, as in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Margaret Mead, and many American scholars in receipt of sabbatical leave and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and a cigarette holder. The boredom was partly a generational thing. Evelyn Waugh, b. 1903; Graham Greene, b. 1904; Cyril Connolly, b. 1903; Ian Fleming, b. 1908. These Englishmen came from a similar class background, and had writing careers which, from the outside at least, seemed characterised by brilliant success. They also had parallel lives as ...”

“... only recent Anglo-Saxon novelist to make much of it, and perhaps here he has been led astray by Graham Greene. The writing of his Argentina-based The Honorary Consul at times appears to be taken over by one of the book’s least convincing characters (and there is stiff competition for that), the appalling folclorico novelist Dr Saavedra, who would ...”

“... Oh, and he also called his wife ‘Filth’, or ‘Philth’. ‘She’s hipposexual,’ he told Graham Greene. You can make your own judgment about all this. Actually, if you’ve read the poems, you probably will already have made your own judgment. To crack open Betjeman’s famously bestselling Collected Poems – ‘the publishing phenomenon of ...”

“... in a preface that the stimulus for Black Robe came originally from reading the Collected Essays of Graham Greene. Notwithstanding historical research and the intervention of Greene, this modern missionary tale seems no less written to a formula than its 19th-century predecessors. Vividly and conscientiously-imagined ...”

“... was P.H. Newby’s in 1951, which offered the understatement that Hartley was ‘quieter’ than Graham Greene, but that he had no situation or character which had been ‘accepted at secondhand from another book’. Greene, like many other authors of his time, had no characters that ...”

“... and benign, cropping up in a Western. ‘He has a lot in common with Ronald Reagan,’ commented Graham Greene, who had been a close friend of Paul VI but, significantly, never received an overture from John Paul: ‘They are both world leaders who were in fact just actors.’ Greene had a dream in which he opened a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with the Gospel of St John, mingling (as Lewis put it) the probable and the marvellous. Like Graham Greene, he worked best when he was putting his spiritual concerns into the form of popular fiction. Human beings are glimpsed in the light of an eternity that is not so much their background as their proper place. The novels rely on stock figures ...”

“... not class or intellect, and the rewards for bravery were blood (other people’s) and diamonds. Graham Greene said that he valued Haggard’s book ‘a good deal higher than Treasure Island’.The story follows the narrator Allan Quatermain – an elephant hunter with good manners – and his colleagues, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, on a journey ...”

“... who feel 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 ...”