“... like space debris, more than enough free-floating material to pad out tome after fresh tome on Graham Greene, or George Orwell, or P.G. Wodehouse, or Evelyn Waugh, or Bernard Shaw, or Cyril Connolly? Must we prepare our shelves for yet another cache of letters, stumbled across like Dead Sea scrolls, every decade? If so, will they, too, rank high with ...”

“... was a bit obsessive about it. Tolstoy describes a rather special case in The Kreutzer Sonata and Graham Greene another in The End of the Affair. There is Herzog, and there must be more. But it seems almost as rare as duelling, which, still important in Richardson, crops up anachronistically in Flaubert, and even more so in Wyndham Lewis. Wronged spouses ...”

“... hair and prominent teeth’. Description of scenery has that careful enigmatic ordinariness that Graham Greene does better: ‘She had opened a latticed Moorish door to the small sunny courtyard outside and moved her chair to sit beside it. An olive tree grew from the dry soil in the middle of the court. Two thirsty-looking potted orange trees sat on ...”

“... her dealings with the English (including her courtship of Virginia Woolf and her friendship with Graham Greene, who dedicated The Honorary Consul to her). But the Prince stayed in her Buenos Aires flat only for one evening, and he was still, no doubt, aching after a fall from his horse as he was progressing in state from Parliament to Government ...”

“... see page 12). Or compare, again, with Waugh’s own report of the dire disorder which overtook Graham Greene in a New York hotel, when his lap began filling with blood. Had he, too, burst? Well, not exactly; there’s an explanation of sorts on page 106. At one point, the two teases fall out. Mitford, who is writing pieces about France for Ian Fleming ...”

“... for self-contained affirmation within a world of dreams. Victor Baxter, the fictitious narrator of Graham Greene’s The Captain and the Enemy, is a lot less sanguine about his – abortive – literary career; he has no literary prizes to flagellate himself for winning in the manner of the en-Nobelled White. Victor is a sorry figure all round. His mother ...”

“... and Dickens, cheerfulness is quite as real as gloom, which isn’t the case with Sebald or Graham Greene. Suffering for them is fundamental in a way that bliss can’t be, and certainly easier to knock a story out of. For the modern age, there is, many would say, something phony about the very idea of happiness. Even the word has a naff ring to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the first collection of novellas, The trouble I’ve seen (1936), received generous praise from Graham Greene and H.G. Wells. For years, her literary standing was compromised by her ties to Ernest Hemingway in the Thirties and Forties. This has long since ceased to be the case. The Face of War, her collected war reporting, is one of the most readable ...”

“... was manufactured in large quantities. Despite a quotation from Vile Bodies and references to Graham Greene, George Orwell and J.B. Priestley, this section is a testament to the inadequacy of written sources, on their own, when researching matters as elusive as the likely ambience in which radio programmes were heard. At one extreme, Scannell and ...”

“... another pastiche, sometimes of Gissing, sometimes of Riceyman Steps, or of the seedy manner of Graham Greene but without the pain. If the novel finds more sympathetic reviewers, they may well describe it as post-modernist, but it is so only in the mode of that retro-post-modernism that is pre-modern, at a loss for no words but new ones. At the end of ...”

“... likelihood and importance? It is in Narayan’s style that the secret lies, the style of which Graham Greene said: ‘After the death of Evelyn Waugh, Narayan is the stylist I most admire.’ Economy is, of course, its salient feature: ‘While writing, I prefer to keep such details to a minimum in order to save my readers the bother of ...”

“... in wartime, despite the rediscovery of patriotism by the British intelligentsia. Cecil Day Lewis, Graham Greene and George Orwell all undertook patriotic work for the BBC or for the Ministry of Information, and led the new celebration of British culture. As E.M. Forster declared in 1940, it now appeared that this culture was ‘genuinely ...”

“... held it back for three or four years) encouraged a spate of ‘grimly honest’ realist dramas. As Graham Greene remarked of one of them, the colliery winding gear, silhouetted against the sky, the pit disaster and the warning siren became as cinematically familiar as the Eiffel Tower or the Houses of Parliament. A.J. Cronin, the best-selling novelist ...”

“... 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 ...”