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Two tall figures under umbrellas appeared in the empty square and loped across to the café: a pair of Englishmen wearing raincoats, and one—the elder—with a black beret. The man with the beret was Graham Greene. I recognised him—as one would; and also because I had seen him in the past on Capri, at…

Among the multiple causes of Graham’s disconnection from Italian scenes one might count his unconcern with aesthetic pleasures important to many who visit the peninsula. Evelyn Waugh, who, in the aftermath of the Second World War, regretted having neglected Europe during his youthful travels of the…

From the 1920s into the 1940s, Greene and several of his talented male contemporaries were working, in English fiction, related veins of anxiety and intelligence, anger and danger, sex and sensibility, and contrasting an ironic private humanity with the petty vanities and great harm of established …

Aversions to food have prompted knowing comment since antiquity, and interpretations are not lacking in our own assiduous day. However that may be, Graham’s “case” was consistent with his hostility to all matters imposed on him—whether by circumstance or natural forces, or at the will of others: a …

He was preternaturally resistant to any form of compulsion; and nothing is more peremptory than the digestive system.