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 power. Their narrative frequently centred on the difficulty of being a moody, clever, thinskinned—and occasionally alcoholic—literate man who commands the devotion of a comely, plucky, self denying younger woman. These were demonstrable elements of educated life in Britain between the sexes and between the wars, and they lingered in Graham’s fiction ever after, briefly “orientalised” in The Quiet American.