“... the back of the jacket confuse the trail just as much. Someone at Century thought it worth getting Graham Greene and Iris Murdoch to write them, and both have come up with deadweight little bits. Greene: ‘The reader will be well rewarded by a strange experience.’ Murdoch: ‘It is essentially about love of art as a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... case-officer, ‘Garbo’ proceeded to invent a fictional cast of sub-agents under his control. Graham Greene could not have improved on it: there was a Gibraltarian waiter, 100 per cent loyal to the German cause; a Welsh nationalist; a violently anti-Russian South African who was also a first-class linguist with contacts in the Ministry of ...”

“... is not disbelieved but put on the back burner. Omission can give the impression of disbelief. Graham Greene wrote of the period in Mexico described in The Power and the Glory that it showed ‘the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth’. That must raise a few Protestant eyebrows, for it tacitly implies that the ...”

“... been to see A Thousand and One Nights. ‘It’s better than The Thief of Bagdad.’ He reads Graham Greene, offers his young literary judgments. Proust and Balzac are the ‘2 greatest novelists in the French language’; Daudet shows ‘a mixture of glibness and sometimes vulgarity yet there’s talent there.’ Much later, turning down a proposal ...”

“... knowledge of Richardson, Fielding, Jane Austen, Trollope and Henry James. Apart from Henry Green, Graham Greene and Adrian Bell, it seems that she hadn’t much use for contemporary authors. She was addicted to Scrabble and ‘Words from a word’, which she played with herself on the backs of the eternally revised sheets of her manuscripts. In 1972 she ...”

“... anti-war jargon, well and truly fragged. The simplest story in the collection is the first. A Graham Greene-like exercise, it is set in West Africa. A young boy, out hunting a big lizard, discovers his mother and her lover in the forest. He observes them unseen, spares the lizard which he set out to kill and walks home to his lost childhood with his ...”

“... of the Lebanon, suggested he had become a more publicly engaged writer in his maturity (like Graham Greene). But ingenious le Carré watchers (specialists in their own kind of espionage) soon turned up interesting privacies. An article by Norman Moss in the Sunday Telegraph, for instance, disclosed that the little drummer girl Charlie was at least ...”

“... in the Caribbean which invited – and vigorously sustained – the inevitable comparisons with Graham Greene and V.S. Naipaul. In Bodily Harm there was a political moral directed at Atwood’s immediate public, the ‘sweet Canadians’ with their readiness to come forward with food aid, tourist traffic and diplomatic support, for a newly-independent ...”

“... Cunningham makes the mistake of laying fictional extracts by Sartre, Malraux, Cyril Connolly and Graham Greene alongside factual accounts which blast them off the page. The Chicago reporter Jay Allen catches the tail-end of the Badajoz massacre, where the bull ring was inches deep in blood, and he watches a workman stopped in the street to have his ...”

“... the end 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 ...”

“... the story, but I missed him by a matter of minutes. The Honorary Consul – ‘Yes, just like the Graham Greene novel,’ she confirmed – was waiting for me in the police chief’s office. The police chief, a pleasant-looking man in his forties, shook hands with me and pointed to a chair. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Why are you asking me?’ I ...”

“... power. If he hadn’t been so much a man of his own making he might have been a character out of Graham Greene, and perhaps the way many weak men came to seem dangerous is a minor theme of 20th-century English letters, and espionage. Spender, the fellow-traveller’s fellow-traveller, was on Hitler’s list of those who should be shot as soon as the ...”

“... aesthetic extravagances serve the moral searchingness of the work. In that sense he was more like Graham Greene – with whom he shared a period and many destinations – than Bruce Chatwin, who might have learned from Lewis how to be a writer who is also a brilliant disappearing act. Lewis wrote as much fiction as anything else but many of his 15 novels ...”

“... his regime largely protected from inquiring eyes by its inaccessibility and its secret police. Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul, published in 1973, was set among the exiles in Corrientes, across the Argentine frontier, but it caught very well the claustrophobic atmosphere of 20th-century Paraguay. The country’s greatest novelist, Augusto Roa ...”