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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 …

Indignation that would not be roused by a degree of industrial wealth no novelist could ever envisage will regularly be directed at the prosperity—rare enough—of a gifted writer. And Graham Greene, since his death, has been rebuked by commentators eager to demonstrate that, in his having caused mil…

One of Graham’s rare contemporary admirations, Padre Pio—a south Italian village priest said to be afflicted with the stigmata—asserted that “suffering is the test and testimony of love.” In Greene, however, I think that suffering was a requirement of consciousness itself: an agitation of spirit pr…