Trust & Festival News

The cast and crew of the 1959 film of Our Man in Havana arrived in the Cuban capital hot on the heels of the revolutionaries themselves so the movie was made under quite exceptional circumstances. A young reporter named Stanley Price was also in the  city and was able to record both events. His memories […]

The encounter in Havana’s Sloppy Joe’s bar between two mid-20th Century literary ‘giants’ is described in Chris Hull’s book Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene’s Cold War Spy Novel. Use the link below to read an extract from Chris’s book about this apocryphal moment. Our Man Down in Havana was published […]

It seems extraordinary that after twenty years of the Graham Greene International Festival there are still unexplored areas of Greene’s life and work to be revealed. It is the case this year. Johanne Elster Hanson will present, ‘Scandinavians are Terribly Scandinavian: Graham Greene’s Friendship with Norwegian writer Nordhal Grieg‘. The talk will be introduced by […]

Mike Hill, who will introduce the film Twenty-One Days, when it is shown at the 2019 Graham Greene International Festival, writes: ‘On 12 January 1940, a review of the film Twenty-One Days by Graham Greene was published in The Spectator. Greene was by then almost at the end of such reviewing, a period of ‘mornings […]

A Day School is taking place in late April presented by Dr. Creina Mansfield (left) and Dr. Martin R. Jervis entitled Getting to Know the General: Graham Greene and Panama. Greene was heavily involved with Panama, its leader and the politics of this small, strategically important Central American country in the 1970s and 80s. He […]

It is unsurprising that in a literary career spanning seventy years, and one as prodigious in output as Graham Greene’s, that some of his writing will evade even the most assiduous of researchers. Full praise then to Michael J. Abolafia who has discovered in the BBC Written Archives Centre at Reading, UK, twelve hitherto unknown […]

Dear All, I hope you are very well and, if you are in the UK, managed okay with the snow and are enjoying our present spell of fresh weather as we move into spring. I also hope that you are looking forward to meeting again in Berkhamsted in September, for the Graham Greene International Festival, […]

Graham Greene visited the Soviet Union on several occasions, particularly in the last decade of his life in order to see his old friend Kim Philby. On the other hand he made only one trip to China – in 1957. Subsequently, he wrote about that experience – but nearly thirty years later. The article called […]

Graham Greene was fond of hiding meanings and private jokes in his novels and stories, part of his habitually secretive nature perhaps.  It is a well-known fact that his 1969 novel Travels With My Aunt, for example, is littered with references to the people he knew – all carefully disguised by the novelist’s hand. Now […]

Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene’s ever-popular novel set in Cuba,  which last year celebrated its 60th anniversary, is in the news again.  Dr Chris Hull’s Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene’s Cold War Spy Novel is to be published in early Spring. The first Pegasus hardback edition will be published […]