Graham Greene
Festival 2019
PROGRAMME
21st Graham Greene International Festival
Thursday 19 – Sunday 22 September
“It’s wonderful, isn’t it, how you always get what you pray for,” reflects Milly, beloved daughter of Wormold, the hapless intelligence agent in Graham Greene’s comic satirical masterpiece Our Man in Havana (1958). The theme for this year’s Festival is Reflections on Greene, to give voice to the shades of reflectiveness and the reflections — and reflections on reflections — that present insights into the life and work of Greene, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Our programme of events could be compared to a veritable hall of mirrors, plentiful in perspectives and diverse in points of view, in which Festival-goers can pursue all manner of different leads and ideas. As always, friendship is the foundation of the Festival, and it is our hope, as an organising team, that you will enjoy all the fun of the fair, especially if you are visiting for the first time, from wherever you begin, and however you conclude. Wish wisely — your dreams could come true!
[Cartoon right, Greene, by Paul Hogarth]
Tickets will be on sale at the door for all events other than the meals, but it would be preferable if you could book in advance online via the website: grahamgreenebt.org/tickets.
Season tickets, which offer a discount, are available for those who plan to attend all the talks and films.
We are sponsored by Greene King plc and supported by Berkhamsted School.
Dr Martyn Sampson, Festival Director
THURSDAY 19th SEPTEMBER
Railway Station (or Court House) and the Town Hall
Afternoon session (£5)
Berkhamsted Railway Station (or Court House)
2.15 Berkhamsted, The Greene Guide: a guided walk of approximately one hour, led by Brian Shepherd, with readings from A Sort of Life, The Human Factor and The Captain and the Enemy, by Judy Mead and Richard Shepherd. Meet outside the rear entrance to Berkhamsted Railway Station (the Platform 4 exit) for introduction. In the event of wet weather, there will be an illustrated talk with readings in The Court House.
Evening session
The Town Hall
(Supper and film £30; supper only £20; film only £10.)
5.15 Film Supper: 5.15 meet for drinks at pay bar, 6.00 waitress – served two-course supper with coffee; vegan/vegetarian option.
(Please book by Monday 9 September at the latest.)
7.15 (For 7.30 start.) Film: 21 Days (London Film Productions, 1940, 81 minutes), directed by Basil Dean, screenplay by Basil Dean and Graham Greene, and starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. Introduced by Mike Hill.
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FRIDAY 20th SEPTEMBER
The Town Hall, The Civic Centre
Morning session (£16)
The Town Hall
9.45 Greene & Sherry: The Fox & The Hound: a talk by Lucinda Cummings-Kilmer, who was research assistant to Norman Sherry, the first biographer of Greene
10.45 Break for tea and coffee
11.15 “It was our Bible”: US Vietnam War era Reporters (1965−1975) and the impact of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American: a talk by Professor Kevin Ruane of Canterbury Christ Church University.
Break for lunch
12.45 A repeat of Berkhamsted: The Greene Guide (£5). In the event of wet weather, there will be an illustrated talk with readings in The Town Hall.
Afternoon session (£16)
The Town Hall
2.30 Brighton Rock: Wrestling a Wonderful Story from out of a Book and onto the Stage: Bryony Lavery and Esther Richardson are interviewed by Mark Lawson.
3.30 Break for tea and coffee
4.00 The Priest in the Novels of Graham Greene: The Saint and the Sinner: A talk by Revd. Canon Emeritus Professor David Jasper of the University of Glasgow. The David Pearce Memorial Talk.
Evening session (£10)
The Civic Centre
7.30 Film night: Our Man in Havana (Kingsmead Productions, 1959, 111 minutes), directed by Carol Reed, screenplay by Graham Greene, and starring Alec
Guinness, Ernie Kovacs, Burl Ives and Maureen O’Hara. Introduced by Quentin Falk.
Tickets for all events are available for purchase online at: grahamgreenebt.org/tickets
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SATURDAY 21st SEPTEMBER
Deans’ Hall and Old Hall, Berkhamsted School (Castle Street)
Morning session (£17)
Deans’ Hall
9.45 Vicious Cities: Shadows of The Third Man in Our Man in Havana: a talk by Dr Chris Hull of the University of Chester and Dr James Clifford Kent of Royal Holloway, University of London.
10.45 Break for tea and coffee
11.15 What or who was The Third Man . . . and the vital question remains. . . .: Miles Hyman and Jean-Luc Fromental are interviewed by Dr Brigitte Timmermann.
Break for lunch
Mid-afternoon session (£17)
Deans’ Hall
2.00 The launch of the Graham Greene Film Review Competition: A presentation by Dr Creina Mansfield, Emma Clarke, Quentin Falk and Dr Jo Wilson.
2.30 Our Woman in Havana: Reporting Castro’s Cuba: a talk by Sarah Rainsford.
3.30 Break for tea and coffee
4.00 Politics and the Novel: a talk by Sir Vince Cable, Leader of the Liberal Democrats 2017-19 and former Secretary of State for Business.
Late-afternoon session, including Birthday Toast (£15)
5.00 The Birthday Toast: by Dr Martyn Sampson.
5.30 Where is the line between true crime and crime fiction?: a talk by Geoffrey Wansell.
Evening session (£36)
Old Hall
8.00 Festival Dinner: three courses with wine and coffee; vegan/vegetarian option, with grace to be said by Revd. Canon Emeritus Professor David Jasper. (Limited to 60 tickets. Please book by Monday 9 September at the latest.)
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Sunday 22 September
VIth Form Centre and Old Hall, Berkhamsted School (Castle Street)
Morning session (£16)
VIth Form Centre, Castle Street
9.00 A Tour of the School & Archives: including a look at the Exhibition Room, the green baize door, Old Hall and the School Chapel. Meet outside Old Hall.
10.00 Scandinavians are terribly Scandinavian: Graham Greene’s friendship with Norwegian writer Nordahl Grieg: a talk by Johanne Elster Hanson.
11.00 Break for tea and coffee
11.30 Graham Greene’s Hungarian Connection: a talk by Dr Tamás Molnár and Dr Ramón Porta.
Old Hall Lunch (£25)
1.00 Farewell Lunch: cold buffet, wine and coffee; vegan/vegetarian option. (Limited to 60 tickets. Please book by Monday 9 September at the latest.)
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The venues will feature exhibitions during the course of the Festival. The Graham Greene Trust Festival bookstall and Richard Frost’s second-hand bookstall will be open on the Friday and Saturday. Both will feature a large selection of books by, and relating to, Graham Greene.
A free Festival brochure will be available during the Festival. It will include a full Festival programme, details of speakers and more.
Tickets are available to purchase online at: grahamgreenebt.org/tickets
Please see the map in the Festival flyer for the whereabouts of all venues. A copy of the flyer can be accessed via the link below.
The map alone can also be accessed via the link below.
A Season ticket to all events, including both films but excluding meals, is available for £106.
There is free admission to all Festival events (excluding meals) for under 21s.
If you have any queries or problems with tickets, please email ticketing@grahamgreenebt.com or phone +44 7988 560496.
Friends of The Graham Greene Trust
You are cordially invited to become a Friend of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust at: grahamgreenebt.org/membership
Benefits include receipt of a quarterly magazine entitled A Sort of Newsletter and a Festival discount of £2 per event (for up to five events).
Presented by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust (charity No. 1064839), a member of the Berkhamsted Arts Trust.
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Speaker Profiles and Session Details
DR. MARTYN SAMPSON, FESTIVAL DIRECTOR
Festival Director Dr Martyn Sampson, who directed the Graham Greene International Festival 2018, is very excited by our programme, which promises 
something for everyone. Martyn holds a PhD on Greene and Catholicism from the Department of English in the University of the West of England, Bristol, where he trained as a university and college lecturer. He is presently working on a scholarly monograph on Greene, and he contributed a biographical introduction to the Ave Maria Press edition of Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World: A Novel (1907, 2016), whose cover features a recommendation from Pope Francis. Martyn believes that Greene is one of the most important authors of the twentieth century. He is keen to promote his standing among both scholars and laypersons. With a keen commitment both to all things Greene and to the hospitably social and cultural significance of the intersections between literature, “theory”, philosophy and theology, Martyn’s sincere hope is that you feel both enthused by our Festival events and welcomed, especially if you are visiting for the first time. Martyn is married to Claire and lives in Bristol, and his wish for one and all is that you thoroughly enjoy yourselves in the beautiful town of Berkhamsted, a small, special part of Greeneland, the perfect place in which to share in conversations, insights and encounters with the life and work of Greene.
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Thursday 19 September
BRIAN SHEPHERD
Brian Shepherd is the author of five audio Guides to countryside walks around Berkhamsted (with a sixth in the planning), researching what writers with local connections had to say about Berkhamsted common led him to many references in Greene’s writings to what he called “my natural escape route”. These passages have now been combined to accompany a walk on the common.
Berkhamsted: The Greene Guide
“If I had known it, the whole future must have lain all the time along those Berkhamsted streets.” In Berkhamsted: The Greene Guide, readings from his writings, delivered in the town centre locations where they were set, give the opening sentence of A Sort of Life an enhanced resonance. The Berkhamsted of Greene’s boyhood and adolescence, broadly the first twenty years of the twentieth century, is brought vividly to life by a combination of Greene’s own words and contemporary photographs. Several pictures are credited to noted local photographer J T Newman, whose ‘half timbered Tudor photographer’s shop…at “our end” of the High Street’ rated a mention by Greene himself.”
ROGER WATKINS
Roger Watkins will deliver a talk to the VI Form of Berkhamsted School. This session is for students of Berkhamsted School only.
With a degree in English from Oxford University, Roger worked in two comprehensive schools becoming Head of English Department. He then joined the expansion in teacher training which was taking place at the time with an appointment as lecturer and then senior lecturer in English at Bulmershe College. Subsequently he was appointed to the staff of the Institute of Education at Leeds University and then the Open University. This was followed by a period in Manchester as Deputy Director of a special initiative by the Department of Education and Science (DES) in the field of educational disadvantage, after which he worked as Assistant Director for the national Volunteer Centre. He was then recruited into the Civil Service to work as an advisor to the Voluntary Service Unit at the Home Office. Finally, he set up and led the management consultancy unit at the Charities Aid Foundation.
Espionage and Farce: Jim Wormold and Graham Greene in Havana
Roger’s talk to the School VI Form will describe Greene’s interest in the political and social situation in Cuba immediately prior to the revolution led by Fidel Castro. Through an examination of his novel Our Man in Havana and his screenplay for the film of the same name directed by Carol Reed, he shall seek to interest the audience in the part literature can play in the understanding of the human response at the micro level to corruption and incompetence in international politics. He intends to emphasise the humour and satire in the novel and encourage the VI Formers’ enthusiasm for, and interest in, the work of Graham Greene generally and the Festival in particular.
MIKE HILL
Mike Hill is a former schoolteacher who now edits the Birthplace trust magazine, A Sort of Newsletter. He was director of the Graham Greene International Festival 2017, and has directed five Festivals in total. With Jon Wise, he has written two books on Graham Greene – The Works of Graham Greene: A Reader’s Bibliography and Guide (2012), and The Works of Graham Greene, Volume 2: A Guide to the Graham Greene Archives (2015). In his introduction to 21 Days, Mike will explore Greene’s own damning judgement on his own film, comment on Greene’s film reviewing generally, and suggest that there are merits to the film after all!
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Friday 20 September
LUCINDA CUMMINGS-KILMER
Lucinda Kilmer was Graham Greene biographer Norman Sherry’s researcher/editor on volumes I & III, for eleven years, spanning 1986 to 2005, at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas. Working with Professor Sherry’s thousands of chronological files & photographs compiled from his research beginning in 1975, Lucinda served as what she terms “an acolyte to genius,” overseeing Sherry’s archives & doing manuscript preparation during those busy years while 
he was grinding out chapter after chapter. When asked if she is an expert on Graham Greene, she answers, “No, I am an expert on the expert of Graham Greene.” Lucinda believes Norman Sherry set the standard for literary detective pursuits. She has a special love for the genre of biography. She was a guest scholar at Trinity for one semester, working on her book about Norman. She is a graduate of Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky.
Greene & Sherry: The Fox & The Hound.
Lucinda writes: “Norman Sherry dedicated his life to English literature, principally Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. He was a ranked scholar in his field. His niche was described as “literary detective” work, a term he defined and quite frankly, reveled in. Whether it was in the basement of the library at Singapore, reading thousands of newspapers and shipping records and manifests for Conrad, or getting sick in the jungle, mountains or tropics chasing Graham, Norman was a truth detector and suffered greatly for his art. His determination to literally follow in Graham’s footsteps was well-known. His adventures were revelatory to the character of Greene, as well as to Norman’s dogged terrier-like digging propensity. I track Norman’s journeys as they mirrored Graham’s. My conclusion is that Graham followed trouble and conflict and drama as it occurred the world over, in order to keep his demons at bay, and Norman followed Graham to satisfy those angels on his shoulder who were bidding him to tell the truth. That man would read two whole history books simply to get a couple of endnotes right. I have pictures of Norman in various venues as well as in the midst of putting order to the chaos that was his office. I learned much from him: how to write and just as crucially, how not to. I know I am ending my sentences with prepositions, but I am Churchillian; wasn’t it he who said, “Ending sentences with a preposition is something up with which we English will not put.” Even if he didn’t say it, he could have. I have no advanced degree, just a B.S., but I was an English major for much of my college years, and working for Norman felt like an 18-year Ph.D. program. I am American, but I submitted his manuscripts according to Random House/Penguin/Jonathan Cape style sheets. It makes me a bit schizophrenic.”
PROFESSOR KEVIN RUANE
Kevin Ruane, Professor of Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University (UK), has written and published widely on many aspects of postwar international history. His books include studies of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and Anglo-American Relations. His 2016 book, Churchill and the Bomb, was named one of the “books of the year” by BBC History Magazine and The Times. Kevin’s latest work, co-authored with Matthew Jones, is a history of the final years of the French war in Vietnam – Anthony Eden, Anglo-American Relations and the Indochina Crisis of 1954 (Bloomsbury 2019). His current project, and the one that brings him back to the Festival for the third time, is a blend of history, biography and literary exploration: An Unquiet Englishman: Graham Greene and the Vietnam War. The book will recreate Greene’s real-life adventures in French Indochina in the early 1950s – the 
escapades and encounters which ultimately spawned The Quiet American – and then explore Greene’s abiding love of Vietnam (the country and its people) and his horror of the American war through the ensuing decades. An Unquiet Englishman is due to be published in 2021-2022.
“It was our Bible”: US Vietnam War-era Reporters (1965-1975) and the impact of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.
Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, his 1955 Vietnam-based novel set against the backdrop of the final years of the French colonial war, acquired a new and unexpected popularity a decade later when the American war began to escalate. For the 1960s generation of Vietnam war reporters, Greene’s novel – short, compact, easy to transport – served as a history-primer in explaining how it was that the United States found itself mired in a terrible, violent conflict in a country about which few Americans, including those US journalists sent to report on the war, knew much about. For luminaries of the journalistic trade like Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam and Gloria Emerson, Greene’s novel, a work of fiction, operated not just as “history” but helped them to make sense of what was happening around them. ‘It was our Bible,’ Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, recalled many years later. In this talk, Kevin Ruane will explore the meaning and importance of The Quiet American for Vietnam war journalists and show how for many of them it retained its relevance when they went on from Vietnam to other conflict zones including Afghanistan and Iraq at the start of the present century.
MARK LAWSON, BRYONY LAVERY & ESTHER RICHARDSON
Mark Lawson
Mark Lawson is a journalist, broadcaster and author. He is best known for presenting Front Row on BBC Radio 4. He writes for The Guardian and presents the series Mark Lawson Talks To . . . on BBC 4. He used to write for The Independent. He has won many awards, and has twice been TV Critic of the Year. In the 1990s, he presented The Late Show on BBC 2, and also presented The Late Review (later Sunday Review and Newsnight Review). In 2004, he made The Truth About Sixties TV, a documentary for BBC 4. He has written a number of radio plays, including St Graham and St Evelyn, which was about the friendship between Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. Additionally, he has written episodes of the television version of the BBC sitcom Absolute Power, in which he appeared as himself. He has written five books, including, most recently, the novels The Deaths (2013) and The Allegations (2016).
Bryony Lavery
Bryony Lavery is a British dramatist. She adapted Brighton Rock for the stage, and is particularly known for her successful and award-winning 1998 play, Frozen, which won the TMA best play award and the Eileen Anderson Central Television award, was produced at Birmingham Rep, then the National Theatre, and then on Broadway where it was nominated for four Tony awards. Stockholm, for Frantic Assembly, won the Wolff-Whiting award for Best Play of 2008, while Beautiful Burnout, for The National Theatre of Scotland and Frantic Assembly, received a Fringe First at Edinburgh, before productions in the UK, New York, Australia and New Zealand. Dirt was nominated for the Charles McArthur award for most outstanding play or musical of 2013 in Washington DC. In all she has written more than twenty plays since 1976 and has has authored translations of foreign works, including Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. She also adapted Treasure Island, the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, into a play which was first performed on the Olivier Stage of the National Theatre, London. She has also written for television and radio, and has published a biography on Tallulah Bankhead. She wrote The Woman Writer’s Handbook, and has taught playwriting at Birmingham University.
Esther Richardson
Esther Richardson is Artistic Director of Pilot Theatre. Esther’s work includes Noughts and Crosses (Pilot Theatre & Derby Theatre) and Brighton Rock (Pilot Theatre & York Theatre Royal), Traitor (Pilot Theatre and Teatret Vårt, Norway), Everything Must Go! (Soho Theatre), The Glee Club and Dancehall (Cast in Doncaster), Blood (Tamasha Theatre), Town (Royal and Derngate, Northampton), A Kind of Alaska, The Dumb Waiter and Bones (Derby LIVE), Breaking the Silence and How to Breath (Nottingham Playhouse) amongst other work for Bolton Octagon, Theatre Writing Partnership and New Perspectives. Her film work also includes two successful shorts The Cake and Wings, which led her to be selected for Creative England’s ifeatures scheme in 2012/13.
Brighton Rock: Wrestling a Wonderful Story from out of a Book and onto the Stage
A stage adaption of Graham Greene’s classic novel, Brighton Rock, toured the UK from February-May 2018. Scripted by Bryony Lavery and directed by Esther Richardson, the play received wide critical acclaim, including an excellent review from the esteemed critic, Mark Lawson. Mark will interview Bryony and Esther, exploring a series of questions, including: why did they choose Brighton Rock to adapt for a theatre piece of young people? Why did Bryony agree to adapt the novel? What are the principle joys in working on Brighton Rock from thematic, dramatic and theatrical perspectives? What is the relationship between adapter and director before one gets to the first day of rehearsal? They will also explore issues of dramaturgy, including a discussion of deciding when it is set, what happened, the excellent use of workshops to solve problems and what the implications are of a non-gender, diverse casting, with some women playing the parts of male characters and vice versa — including why it is a wonderful idea. They will explore the role played by Hannah Peel, the composer for the production, who, for some of the time, was the onstage musician — she provided the soundscape, including the music, songs, mood and more. The interview will also consider how the set was designed, and playing with movement.
REVD. CANON EMERITUS PROFESSOR DAVID JASPER
David Jasper is an Anglican priest and Emeritus Professor at the University of Glasgow, where he was Professor of Literature and Theology. He has also taught for ten years as Changjiang Chair Professor of Comparative Literature in Renmin University of China, Beijing. He was Principal of St. Chad’s College, Durham University. He was educated at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Durham, and holds an honorary degree in Theology at Uppsala University, Sweden. His most recent book, Heaven in Ordinary (2018), explores poetry and religion in a secular age.
The Priest in the Novels of Graham Greene: The Saint and the Sinner.
“When you have been a priest as long as I have you will recognize a colleague. Even without his collar” (Monsignor Quixote). I write this paper having been a priest myself for more than forty years, usually not wearing my collar. What makes Graham Greene’s priests so recognisable, even in disguise or when deeply erring? This is an essay on the sense of holiness in the writings of Graham Greene.
QUENTIN FALK
Quentin Falk has been a freelance film critic and magazine editor for more than 35 years. He is also the author of the award-nominated Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene, now in its fourth edition. His other books include biographies of Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Hopkins, Albert Finney, the Rank Organisation, and Lord Lew Grade. More recently he has ventured into True Crime with The Musical Milkman Murder, and, in 2018, maritime history, Mr Midshipman VC, about a British naval hero of Gallipoli. In his introduction to Our Man in Havana, Quentin will explore the seeds of both the book and the film then discuss the filming itself through the eyes of Greene and others – the particular fascination being that it was shot in Cuba after the Castro revolution whereas the action is, of course, set during the Batista regime. He will also include both contemporary and more retro reactions to the film, bearing in mind that we will be watching it nearly 60 years – how time flies – after its premiere in 1960
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Saturday 21 September
DR. CHRISTOPHER HULL & DR. JAMES CLIFFORD KENT
Christopher Hull
Chris Hull is Senior Lecturer in Spanish & Latin American Studies at the University of Chester. His research focuses on British interactions with Latin America. Chris’s book Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene’s Cold War Spy Novel was published by Pegasus Books earlier in 2019. He previously presented at the annual Graham Greene International Festival in 2009 and 2012.
James Clifford Kent
James Clifford Kent is Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is a practising photographer and his
research focuses on visual cultures. He earned his PhD from Royal Holloway in 2012. His first monograph entitled Aesthetics and the Revolutionary City: Real and Imagined Havana was published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of their Studies of the Americas series in 2018.
Vicious Cities: Shadows of The Third Man in Our Man in Havana.
On the 60th anniversary of the Graham Greene/Carol Reed film Our Man in Havana (1959) and the 70th anniversary of their screenwriter/director collaboration The Third Man (1949), this joint talk will explore both the successful and less acclaimed aspects of these two films, and reasons for their differing critical and commercial success. It will examine the political and social background to Our Man in Havana’s on-location shooting in April-May 1959, just six months after the novel’s publication, and four months into the Fidel Castro-led Cuban Revolution. Furthermore, it will analyse the revolutionary authorities’ concerns and censorship of the script, how this affected both the production process and the film itself, and Cubans’ critical reception of the film. The talk will also focus on the films’ representations of pre-revolution Havana and post-war Vienna, and consider the different cinematographic techniques employed by the filmmakers. In doing so, it will identify the way both real and imagined spaces and places are used to convey a sense of atmosphere. To illustrate this, the talk will analyse Greene and Reed’s use of real-world landmarks (e.g. Vienna’s Wiener Riesenrad) and recognisable locations (Old Havana’s bustling streets), and scrutinise the influence this had on the way these cities were subsequently imagined.
JEAN-LUC FROMENTAL , MILES HYMAN & DR. BRIGITTE TIMMERMANN
Jean-Luc Fromental
After ten years publishing fiction, introducing such authors as Stephen King to French readers, Jean-Luc Fromental moved on to his all-time favourite field: comics, or bande dessinée. He worked first as a critic for the French daily Le Matin de Paris, then as editor for cult publisher Les Humanïdes Associés, where he published Will Eisner’s A Contract With God – regarded by many as the very first modern graphic novel. He eventually became editor-in-chief of Métal Hurlant, their flagship magazine.
In the late 80s, he added scriptwriting to his list of activities, mostly for animation, TV and films. Meanwhile, he continued to toy with literature, publishing short books just to keep in touch with the Old Masters – works like Stevenson’s The Merry Men, Rudyard Kipling’s unpublished war letters to his son John (put in contrast with his bildungspoem “If”), or Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales (illustrated by Miles Hyman).
In 2003, he started his own adult comics imprint: Denoël Graphic, devoted to the exploration of common ground between prose and graphic narration. Among the sixty-odd authors he has published to date appear ground-breaking artists such as Robert Crumb, Posy Simmonds or Alison Bechdel.
As an author, Fromental has penned more than thirty books, from novels to travel writing, from children’s books (three of them with Hyman – their Broadway Chicken was included in the New York Time’s list of notable children’s books) to graphic novels.
As for his work in animated films, Loulou L’incroyable secret, a full-length feature for which he created the screenplay, won the Cesar for Best animation film in 2014. His forthcoming screen event is set for September 2019: an adaptation of Dino Buzzati’s The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, directed by graphic artist Lorenzo Mattotti.
He lives and works in Paris.
Miles Hyman
American author and artist Miles Hyman created his first books for French comics publisher Futuropolis in the late 1980’s. His drawings have appeared in France, the UK and the United States in publications by Gallimard, Actes Sud, Denoël Graphic, Le Seuil, Simon & Schuster, MacLehose Press, Farrar Straus & Giroux and Chronicle Books. Hyman’s work appears regularly in Le Monde, Libération, XXI, Télérama, The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe and The New Yorker Magazine.
Inspired by mid-20th century American realism, European symbolist painters but also Film Noir and popular art, Hyman has become best known for his literary collaborations. He has worked with such international authors as Jerome Charyn, Philippe Djian, Jean-Bernard Pouy, Jean-Luc Fromental and Tonina Benacquista. His illustrated adaptations include novels by John Dos Passos, Joseph Conrad and Jules Verne.
Starting in 2010 Hyman brought his unique narrative style to graphic novels. The Black Dahlia, based on James Ellroy’s noir thriller and adapted by Matz avec film-maker David Fincher as part of the Rivages/Casterman/Noir collection, marked the beginning of a series of albums based on literary themes and titles.
His recent publications include The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, published simultaneously in the United States by Farrar Straus & Giroux and in Europe by Casterman. In 2017 Dupuis published The Prague Coup, in collaboration with Jean-Luc Fromental. His most recent book, Rome appeared in the prestigious Louis Vuitton Travel Book collection in 2018, with the original drawings featured in a solo show in the roman museum L’Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in October 2018 and at the parisian Galerie Martel in March of 2019.
Hyman’s significant body of work has been featured in several monographs to date: Miles Hyman / Drawings, was published by Glénat in 2015 and includes more than 200 of the artist’s images, accompanied by original texts by Jean-Luc Fromental, François Guérif, Jerome Charyn, Marc Villard and Etienne Robial. In 2018 the publisher Locus Solus published Miles Hyman, l’Entre-deux Mondes, bringing together drawings and paintings created throughout the artist’s career.
Hyman’s work is featured regularly by galleries in New York, Brussels, Geneva and Paris. The Musée d’Illustration Jeunesse in Moulins, France organized a retrospective of Hyman’s work in February 2017 entitled Miles Hyman, The Suspension of Time. The contemporary art space La Chapelle des Ursulines in Quimperlé, France dedicated a major solo show of Hyman’s work the following year: Miles Hyman, l’Entre-deux Mondes. The artist’s most recent work will be included in shows at the BRAFA art fair in Brussels, Belgium and at ArtParis in Paris, France.
(Images of Jean-Luc Fromental & Miles Hyman courtesy of Chloé Vollmer-Lo)
Dr. Brigitte Timmermann
Dr. Brigitte Timmermann is a graduate of history and English literature of the University of Vienna. She is visiting professor of American colleges based in Austria, works in adult education and runs a family business in tourism. A great fan of Graham Greene, it is not surprising that one of her special fields of interest is the making of The Third Man about which she has written a book, The Third Man’s Vienna: Celebrating a Film Classic (2015). She led Festival-goers in a tour of the Vienna of The Third Man in October 2018.
What or who was The Third Man . . . and the vital question remains. . . .
The Prague Coup, a graphic novel written by Jean-Luc Fromental and illustrated by Miles Hyman, is set partly in Vienna at the time of the making of The Third Man. Greene is the hero, and there feature individuals who were key to Greene’s life, including the intelligence agent, Elizabeth Montagu, and the Soviet spy Kim Philby. The book was published in French in 2017 to critical acclaim, and released as an English language translation in 2018. Brigitte, Viennese tour guide and house expert on The Third Man, will be keen to explore with Jean-Luc and Miles what distinguishes Jean-Luc’s approach to Greene from that of Miles; the importance of Vienna both for the movie and in terms of its significance for intelligence agents; the way the relationship Holly-Harry mirrors his relationship to Philby or might even be a secret message and also the connection of The Third Man and Nicodemus, author of an apocryphal gospel, about which Jean-Luc writes: “I saw the title, as well as the mystery about two or three men carrying the supposedly dead Harry Lime, as echoes to the presence of Nicomedus – author of an apocryphal Gospel expelled from the canon – as third man along John The Baptist and Joseph of Arimathea at Jesus’ entombment.” Jean-Luc continues: “the notorious mistaken gesture of the Viennese janitor at the beginning of the film (where he points to the sky saying “hell” and then to the ground saying “heaven”), led me to think of Lime as a figure of God hiding in shame from mankind after the horrors of the WW2, in the sewers. A little far fetched, maybe, but Rollo (Holly) Martins acts exactly as a disciple reluctant to lose faith.” In addition to exploring these thematic threads, Brigitte will also be keen to pursue Jean-Luc’s fascination with Greene and ask whether The Prague Coup was intended to be a graphic novel in the first place; as well as asking how the collaboration with Miles came about, and how Miles went about creating the images.
DR. CREINA MANSFIELD, EMMA CLARKE, DR. JO WILSON-BARNARDO & QUENTIN FLAK
Creina Mansfield
Creina Mansfield is a writer and teacher. She taught in Manchester University’s Centre for Continuing Education (CCE) Department for ten years and now devises and teaches courses for the public. She has degrees from Cambridge and Manchester Universities. Her PhD thesis was a narratological analysis of some of Graham Greene’s fiction. She has published works of fiction for young people and also a reworking of The Quiet American from Phuong’s point of view. Her special interests are the modern novel, the theory of narrative structure and film. She lives in Cheshire with her husband and their cats and dogs.
Emma Clarke
Emma Clarke joined the film industry in 1990 when she was living in Los Angeles. Learning the business from the bottom up she then ran the London office of Fine Line Features, the arthouse division of New Line Cinema, for four years and was the executive on Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night starring Nigel Hawthorne, Ben Kingsley and Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman’s directorial debut The Winter Guest starring Emma Thompson. Joining the UK Film Council in 2000 she was an executive in charge of finding and supporting new filmmakers and worked on the first films of Andrea Arnold, Sara Gavron, and Saul Dibb as well as stellar arthouse talents like Jane Campion, Shane Meadows, and Sally Potter, and directors from the worlds of TV and documentaries like Armando Ianucci and Paul Greengrass. For ten years at the Film Council she was the executive on around 60 films that garnered a wide and impressive variety of accolades and awards at Bafta, the Cannes and Berlin film festivals, and other festivals around the world. She is now the course leader of a Screenwriting MA that she has co-designed at the University of Manchester that is designed to be industry facing and aims to get its alumni working in Film and Television.
Jo Wilson-Barnardo
A Trustee of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust since 2011, Dr Jo Wilson-Barnardo has been a clinical psychologist for over three decades. She specialises in Group Psychology and is an accredited Group Schema Therapist and Trainer. Her qualifications in Psychology are complemented by an MSc in Criminology from the University of Cambridge, and her interests include film noir and the history of espionage in the twentieth century. A collector of Graham Greene first editions for many years, Dr Wilson-Barnardo is well versed in all facets of Graham Greene’s oeuvre, and has a particular interest in the application of psychological theory to Greene’s presentation of character and motivation. She sits on the Events Committee of the East of England Branch of the British Psychological Society and helps organise the Society’s film programme, Psy-Fi, at the Arts Cinema, Cambridge. She is also a reviewing editor for the newsletter of the British Psychological Society, and a selector of papers for presentation at the Society’s annual conference.
Quentin Falk
(Please find above a biography of Quentin Falk).
Graham Greene Film Review Prize.
The aim in launching the Graham Greene Film Review Prize is to further enhance Greene’s reputation and widen knowledge of his work, especially in education. Films are a popular medium for the younger generation, some of whom do not know Greene’s work. We’re keen to spread the word and will begin by publicising the competition via university Creative Writing and Film departments, though the competition will be open to anyone over the age of 18.
We have formed a partnership with the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing to undertake this venture. As far as we can tell, there is no similar prize for film reviewing. The judges won’t be looking for imitations of Greene’s style, but for quality – and the review (of 1,000 words or less) can be of any film. We have a very strong judging panel in: Quentin Falk, Emma Clarke and Dr Jo Wilson. Quentin is of course the author of Travels in Greeneland, and Emma teaches screenwriting at Manchester University and has been involved in the film industry for twenty years. Jo, who is very knowledgeable about film, is a Trustee of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust. Creina Mansfield, also a Trustee, and author of The Quiet Soldier: Phuong’s Story (2014), is co-ordinating the initiative.
The prize will be £500 and the winning entry will be published in the Manchester Literary Review.
SARAH RAINSFORD
Sarah Rainsford has been a BBC foreign correspondent for 17 years, beginning in Moscow. She has since been based in Istanbul and Madrid – with stints reporting from Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine – and was posted to Havana in 2011. She is now back in Russia. Our Woman in Havana is her first book and is based on her experience of living and reporting in Cuba during the last years of life under the Castros.
Our Woman in Havana: Reporting Castro’s Cuba.
The Havana that Graham Greene discovered in the mid-1950s was the capital of a pleasure island, alluring for a manic depressive writer seeking escape. He would step out of his hotel to offers of girls and drugs, admire the “lovely tarts” as he strolled the tree-lined Prado and by night, make for the seedy backstreets of Chinatown to watch the legendary sex shows of Superman.
This city became the backdrop to Greene’s Cold War spy comedy but it was only when I reread Our Man in Havana that I realised my own office on Calle Lamparilla was a short distance from the fictional vacuum cleaner shop of Greene’s hapless spy hero, Wormold.
By the time Greene wrote the opening line of his novel in the Sevilla hotel, President Batista’s repressive regime was “creaking dangerously” towards revolution. Six decades on, in my own years as BBC Havana correspondent, Cuba was facing the end of the Castros’ long era of rule. Seeking Greene’s traces in the city we shared, I tell the story of Havana at a new time of transition and uncover the stories of Habaneros today, their lives shaped by Fidel Castro’s giant social experiment.
SIR VINCE CABLE
The Rt Hon Sir Vince Cable is the Leader of the Liberal Democrats 2017-19 and former Secretary of State for Business. He was the Member of Parliament for Twickenham from 1997-2015 and has been so again since 2017. He was Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and President of the Board of Trade from 2010 to 2015, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats from 2007 to 2010, and Shadow Chancellor from 2003 to 2010. Before joining politics, he was Chief Economist for Shell, a lecturer in economics at Glasgow University, and an adviser to the Kenyan government and senior Labour politicians. He is a former fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, and the London School of Economics. His book, The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and What It Means (2009), a bestseller, offers an explanation of the 2008 world financial crash, and how Britain should respond. He has also published Free Radical: A Memoir (2010), After the Storm: The World Economy and Britain’s Economic Future (2016), and, recently, a political thriller titled Open Arms (2018). In 2010 he took part in the Strictly Come Dancing Christmas special on the BBC.
(Image of Vince Cable courtesy of Simon Broom, Artist)
Politics and the Novel
Sir Vince Cable’s talk will be entitled “Politics and the Novel.” He writes: “It would look at politicians who have written novels and novelists who have written about the political world (mainly but not exclusively about the UK). Many others, Greene included, have written about the context in which the political debate is framed. As a politician who has tiptoed into the world of fiction I am fascinated by the connections (and by the current phenomenon of a steep fall in demand for fiction because the real world is so impossible, and scary).”
GEOFFREY WANSELL
Geoffrey Wansell was born in Scotland and educated in Hampstead, the London School of Economics and the University of Sheffield, where he taught politics. He always wanted to become a journalist and writer. He subsequently worked at The Times Educational Supplement and The Times, then, later, joined Britain’s first commercial radio stations – London Broadcasting and Independent Radio News. While working at LBC/IRN, with Marcel Berlins, he published his first book, a study of juvenile delinquency and the law for Pelican Books. He was the official biographer of the Herefordshire born serial killer Frederick West, and has recently published, with Penguin, Pure Evil: Inside the Minds and Crimes of Britain’s Worst Criminals and Lifers: Inside the Minds of Britain’s Most Notorious Criminals. Geoffrey is presenter of the CBS Reality Series, Murder by the Sea, and has appeared, too, as a commentator on Voice of a Serial Killer.
(Image of Geoffrey Wansell courtesy of Caroline Forbes)
Where is the line between true crime and crime fiction?
Geoffrey Wansell’s talk is titled “Where is the line between true crime and crime fiction?” Of this, Geoffrey writes: “Greene himself explored the issue in Ways of Escape when he wrote about Brighton Rock. As a lifelong fan, I also trod in one or two of his footsteps along the way, starting my career at The Times, becoming a columnist on a short-lived magazine, and turning to reviewing. I wrote to him on more than one occasion to ask if he would be interviewed, and even visited Antibes after his death to write about his ghost.
“I think I am a true inhabitant of Greeneland for I have written three books about murderers, and review crime and thriller fiction for the Daily Mail. I have also made more than 80 hours of television about killers, and run a podcast on both true crime and crime fiction with my daughter Molly.
“So I intend to take the audience on a journey through my own career to illustrate my thesis that you cannot have crime fiction without true crime, and that true crime – often – feeds on fictional characters.”
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Sunday 22 September
JOHANNE ELSTER HANSON & IAN THOMSON
Johanne Elster Hanson grew up in Norway and recently graduated with a degree in English literature with creative writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA), where she wrote her dissertation on Norwegian writer Nordahl Grieg’s friendship with Graham Greene. Johanne has written about theatre, art, and literature for a variety of outlets in both English and Norwegian, and is currently reviewing books for Bookstoker. She will commence an MA in Biography and Creative Non-Fiction at the UEA in September.
Scandinavians are terribly Scandinavian: Graham Greene’s friendship with Norwegian writer Nordahl Grieg.
Johanne writes: “The friendship between Graham Greene and the Norwegian writer Nordahl Grieg is barely touched upon in their individual biographies, unknown to many readers/scholars, and has never been examined fully. Based on the research I have undertaken for my undergraduate dissertation, I will present a paper on the friendship between Greene and Grieg, which lasted from 1932 until the latter’s untimely death in 1943. With Norwegian being my first language, I have been able to compare the works of the two authors, as well as to access a wealth of biographical material relating to their friendship. I have translated parts of Grieg’s books and letters that have never appeared in English before, making them accessible to English-speaking scholars/readers interested in Greene/Grieg, British/Scandinavian literary history, or comparative literature.
“In my talk, I will untangle the curious connection between the two men in light of their literary production. I have used letters, diary entries, recordings, and biographies in both English and Norwegian to map out the Greene/Grieg friendship, Grieg’s lifelong connection with England, and Greene’s relationship with Scandinavia. My research has shown that the Greene/Grieg connection was more extensive than what it has been made out to be by previous scholars and biographers, and that Greene kept in contact with other Norwegians in Grieg’s circle. Greene had only published three novels by the time he met Grieg, and very little of Grieg’s work had at that time been translated into English. However, there are overlapping themes in their writings, which might explain why they struck up the warm friendship that they did. I will therefore compare themes, ideas, and moods in their works, with particular emphasis on the two men’s romanticised view of danger and death, and place this in the context of their correspondence and individual biographies.”
Ian Thomson
Ian Thomson is known as “an author of great range and sensibility” (The Guardian). He is an award-winning biographer, reporter, translator and literary critic. Film director, Jonathan Demme, commented that Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti (1992), was a “great and abiding classic”. His biography of Primo Levi, Primo Levi: A Life (2002), which took 10 years to write, won the Royal Society of Literature’s W.H. Heinemann Award. In 2005, he returned to the West Indies to write The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (2009). The book, banned in Jamaica for political reasons, was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book Award. Ian Thomson has edited Articles of Faith: The Collected Tablet Journalism of Graham Greene (2006) and spoke at the Graham Greene International Festivals in 2004, 2006 and 2012. His latest book is Dante’s Divine Comedy (2018). This was a Financial Times and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year.
PROFESSOR TAMÁS F MOLNÁR & DR. RAMÓN RAMI-PORTA
Tamás F Molnár
Tamás F Molnar PhD DSc (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) is a Hungarian thoracic surgeon with wide international clinical and scientific background (with spells in UK). His present full professorial post at the University of Pécs, Medical Faculty, covers – beyond other, more chest surgery related profiles – a Medical Humanities program as well. His lifelong interest in the oeuvre of Graham Greene combined with his studies and researches earning him an MA Degree in History (University of Pécs, Hungary) resulted in explorations of some new aspects of Greene’s interest in Cold War Central Europe and beyond.
Ramón Rami-Porta
Ramón Rami-Porta earned his MD degree at the Medical School of the University of Barcelona in 1980, his specialty certification in thoracic surgery at the Jimenez Diaz Foundation, in Madrid in 1985, and his PhD degree at the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1986. He is a practising thoracic surgeon at the Mutua Terrassa University Hospital, in Terrassa, Barcelona, Spain. His interest in Graham Greene dates back to his medical school years, when he read The Human Factor. He has attended almost all Graham Greene Festivals since the very first one in 1998. He co-organized the itinerant Graham Greene Centennial Conference in 2004 that followed part of the route described in Monsignor Quixote.
Graham Greene’s Hungarian Connection.
Graham Greene visited Hungary in 1975 on the invitation of Laszlo Robert, a Hungarian journalist. Robert’s version of the story of the four day visit behind the Iron Curtain was published in Hungarian in 1988. An extensive archival research and personal interviews resulted in a reconstruction of the events took place in early September, 1975. The different intents, aims and possible objectives of the players of the journey seen as a game are to be discussed. A sketch of the contemporary bipolar political world, as a background is presented. The different levels of the explored historical evidences are graded according to the scales of the Evidence Based Medicine. While the final piece of the puzzle-game is still missing, a quite coherent overall picture with an acceptable probability level is promised.
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