Day 3 – Saturday 5th October 2024

Morning session

Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (Castle Street)

£25

9:45 – Me and My Girl: Graham Greene’s Relationship with Dorothy Glover, 1938 to 1971: The historian Kevin Ruane (Canterbury Christ Church University) pursues the facts about the elusive Dorothy Glover, a children’s writer and set designer with whom Graham Greene conducted an affair in the 1940s and to whom he remained quietly devoted until her death.

10:45 – Break for tea and coffee

11:15 – Our Man in Oshawa: Reading Graham Greene at the Right and Wrong Times in a Writer’s Life: Randy Boyagoda (University of Toronto), a professor and leading Canadian novelist discusses his own creative and often comic work in light of his reading of Graham Greene.

Break for lunch

Afternoon session

Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (Castle Street)

£34, including Birthday Toast

2:30 – Visions of Brighton: Andrew Biswell (Manchester Metropolitan University) will speak on how the Brighton of Graham Greene’s novel and the two films adapting it compares with those of John Piper, Lord Alfred Douglas, and John Betjeman as a place of the imagination.

3:30 – Break for tea and coffee

4:00 – On the Rocks: The Intelligence, Literary and Personal Relationship of Ian Fleming and Graham Greene: The biographer and novelist Nicholas Shakespeare will tell us what he has learned about two great spy novelists in the course of writing an acclaimed new biography of Ian Fleming.

5:15 – The Birthday Toast

Evening session

Old Hall, Berkhamsted School (Castle Street)

£50

8:00 – Festival Dinner: three courses with wine and coffee: vegan/vegetarian option.