Flirting with damnation
THIS NEW BIOGRAPHY of Graham Greene by Richard Greene (no relation) has attracted enthusiastic reviews and rightly: it’s a feat, a one-volume biography of the man which gives an account of his work, his travels, personal relations, finances and beliefs, without being anything but readable. And given the complexity of every one of those things, this is high praise.
You pass from Antibes to Indochina to Sierra Leone to Latin America to the Congo in blessedly short chapters that give a coherent, not uncritical, account of the politics without ever losing touch with the personal. By comparison with the assiduous official biography by Norman Sherry in three volumes, this is a real achievement. As the author observes of his subject, “Here is a single life on which much of the history of
