Day 2 – Friday 4th October 2024

Morning session

The Town Hall

£23

9:45 – Traveling the Lawless Roads: Anglophone Writers in Mexico, 1926-1946: Julia G. Young (Catholic University of America) will discuss how writers flocked to Mexico, and, describing the church-state conflict, provided a beautiful but distorted view of the country.

10:45 – Break for tea and coffee

11:15 – The Curious Case of Graham Greene’s Autobiographies – A Personal View: The bibliographer and historian Jon Wise will address the question of how Graham Greene came to write his autobiographies.

Break for lunch

Afternoon session

The Town Hall

£23

2:30 – Greene Intelligence: Graham at SIS: Nigel West, a leading expert on security and intelligence, will draw on archival research and conversations with Graham Greene’s contemporaries at SIS, including his brother-in-law Rodney Dennys, to understand the novelist’s role in the secret world.

3:30 – Break for tea and coffee

4:00 – Heaven Is Near and Its Aftermath – Swedish Actress Anita Björk and Writer Stig Dagerman: Lo Dagerman, a writer and editor, discusses the literary and artistic legacies of her parents. Her father was a leading Swedish writer and her mother an acclaimed actress, with whom Graham Greene had a relationship in the late 1950s.

Evening session

The Civic Centre

£14

8:00 – Film: The Fallen Idol (London Film Productions, 1948, 95 mins.), the first collaboration between Graham Greene and the director Carol Reed, this universally admired film stars Ralph Richardson, Michèle Morgan, Sonia Dresdel, and the boy actor Bobby Henrey in a suspenseful tale based on Greene’s short story, ‘The Basement Room’. Introduced by Mike Hill.