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“... We live in reactionary times. One indication of this is the growing trend among both politicians and academics to prescribe what historical study should be: how it should be organised and conducted, what it should be about, why it should be pursued at all. Such prescriptions can sometimes stem from genuine scholarly or cultural concern. But they can also betoken a dangerously closed mind ...”

“... settlers in North America, Ireland and the Caribbean. But he takes issue with scholars such as Jack Greene who have interpreted all this as evidence of the emergence of an imperial identity. Rather, he suggests, these notions constituted an ideology, and as such were always contested and unstable. In the end, the British failed to find a fully ...”

“... imperfectly Americanised to the end. An influential cohort of historians, including John Murrin, Jack Greene and T.H. Breen, has established that anglicisation, the dominant trend in 18th-century colonial life, was a vital precondition of the American Revolution. Only in the 1770s did the notion that a corrupt motherland was excluding her overseas ...”

“... Dorset, Cape Cod, and now in Honduras; and produced as many different kinds of novel. Graham Greene ranges as widely, but the Greene themes and style impose them selves; and Theroux has written on V.S. Naipaul’s themes. Apparently his own work doesn’t have the same sort of continuities. But we can spot, at least, a ...”

“... When the American poet Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867) travelled to Europe in 1822 he was carrying letters of introduction to Byron, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Lafayette and Talleyrand, though he never actually met any of them – whether through shyness or negligence or something else is not clear. Dickens called on Halleck on arrival in New York in 1842, but later wrote him off as a mere imitator ...”

“... Patricia Highsmith has been praised by Graham Greene in the good old way as ‘a writer who has created a world of her own’. She can be even better than that – when she takes a world and makes it not only her own but ours. She lurks in the murk where you have to peer to check if this is an – or the – underworld ...”

“... with the funeral of what a ministerial encomium calls ‘New Zealand’s most venerated writer’, Jack Macalister. Present is wife Sarah, who urges those present to read his books, the Macalister girls Dora and Emily, twenty years apart in age, and Jack’s friend and first publisher Charles Bremner, who was also Sarah’s ...”

“... or heterodox priests appear in some of his books, Stone has frequently been compared to Graham Greene – a writer he thinks entirely ‘phony’. (The most sinister character in A Flag for Sunrise is a loud Englishman.) Like Greene, though, he is much concerned with faith, or the lack of it, and his novels are populated ...”

“... At the Grammy awards the other week, an unusual note was struck by Michael Greene, a record industry bigwig. The only real point of interest at most award ceremonies is the frocks (and sometimes, admittedly, the hair), so it was a break with tradition when Greene and his tuxedo launched into the subject of Internet piracy ...”

“... spectrum than he is to the relatively straightforward adventure (Ian Fleming, Geoffrey Household, Jack Higgins), in which the difficulties and dangers of the mission are more important than its secrets. He still needs to send his hero into danger, he still needs an active climax, but he has also got to disentangle the intricate plots-within-plots that he has ...”

“... on the life of Sylvia Plath, Alison Lurie’s obituary of Mary McCarthy, Salman Rushdie on Graham Greene, Claire Tomalin on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and as the limits on the new paper’s resources became apparent I thought how hard it would be to put together pages ...”

“... in a novel without making a dog’s dinner out of the book? Some people, such as Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Chinua Achebe, Georges Bernanos, Kate O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of ...”

“... at work. With Steinbeck one can guess what the factors were. Europeans have always had what Graham Greene called a ‘fetish’ about him. It was a lucky stroke that The Grapes of Wrath – with its broad sentimentality about endurance under intolerable pressure – was published in England in the month that war was declared. Scandinavians have a particularly ...”

“... weekly broadcasts drew audiences of between 30 and 40 per cent of the population. Graham Greene, no admirer of Priestley as a novelist, declared him second only to Churchill as a national leader. His success made him vain and hard to manage, but the BBC hired him for a second series early in 1941. His demands in these broadcasts that a declared war ...”

“... 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 part based ...”