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There is not the least doubt that Pietro Catte in the abstract has no reality, any more than any other man on the face of the earth. But the fact remains that he was born and that he died, as those irrefutable certificates prove. And this endows him with reality in actual fact, because birth and de…

[...] "What a damn silly profession ours is" (wherein "profession" carries, as always in Greene, the pull of its etymological roots). [...]

The Marxist sentiments voiced in Blunt's art reviews and in his contribution to The Mind in Chains are banal. They constitute the widespread routine of anger of a middle-class generation caught up in the threefold context of Western economic deprivation, rising Fascism and Nazism, and what were b…

Throughout 1938, these stern hopes seemed to wither. The choice before the artist grew ever more stark. He could, wrote Blunt in his Spectator piece for June 24th, either discipline himself to paint the world as it was, paint something else as mere frivolous distraction, or commit suicide. [...]

It is notoriously difficult to make a strong case for the enduring vitality of criticism written for a weekly or monthly magazine. [...] of course we find, among other things, a variety of local insights or judgments that may seem to us, and often are, ephemeral. [...]

But then all worthwhile in…