Research articles

Reproduced here is the text of Kevin Ruane’s talk at the 26th Graham Greene International Festival in September 2025 in which he reported on the near-completion of his vast project – begun 14 years ago – to collect, collate, transcribe and edit all of Graham Greene’s letters to Catherine Walston, the greatest love of his life and the inspiration for his 1951 novel, arguably his finest, The End of the Affair.

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Zoeb Matin revisits Graham Greene’s 1935 novel England Made Me. A dramatic and compelling work, Zoeb argues that this ‘underrated gem’ deserves to be rediscovered. That said, beware of competing titles. In 1953, the first American edition was called The Shipwrecked, a sales ploy Greene went along with to maximise appeal in the US market by downplaying the Englishness of the original title. However, in subsequent reissues, Greene reverted to England Made Me.

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Surgeon and Greene scholar Ramón Rami Porta delves into Greene’s relationship with Panama’s José de Jesús Martínez, nicknamed Sergeant Chuchú. A poet, playwright, philosopher, pilot and mathematician, Chuchú was also an aide to General Omar Torrijos, leader of Panama from 1968 to 1981, and acted as Greene’s interpreter and guide during his several visits to the country.

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In 2023, Nigel Purse visited Mexico and took with him a copy of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940), regarded by many Greene readers as his finest work. Nigel on his trip mapped and compared past and present and connected both to Greene’s masterful novel as well as to his Mexican travelogue The Lawless Roads (1939). It all makes for a fascinating Mexican detour.

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Zoeb Matin looks at an unfinished, discarded, hence unpublished Greene novel from the 1930s entitled The Other Side of the Border. Written at some point following Greene’s return from his daunting journey across largely uncharted Liberia in 1935 – an adventure relived in his travel work Journey Without Maps (1936) – The Other Side of the Border, had it been completed and published, would have marked Greene’s first substantial non-European-centred novel.

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Drawing on the rich but often neglected archives of the American Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS, the Oscars Archive), Festival Director Kevin Ruane takes us behind the

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In 2008 the late Professor François Gallix found a fragment of an early Graham Greene murder mystery that was later published with the title The Empty Chair. Philip Hormbrey, picking up the baton, feels that the find is almost certainly the first chapters of a detective story that Greene planned to write for a Methuen competition. The completed book would have been over 70,000 words long and was provisionally titled ‘Queen’s Pawn’. So what happened?

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This timeline was originally compiled by Ken Sherwood and this latest edition as some additions and amplifications by Kevin Ruane. The timeline contains a link to a printable pdf version.

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Jay Parini, the distinguished American writer and academic, has turned his attention to Graham Greene and in particular to Greene’s time in Sierra Leone working for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) during the Second World War. This article was first published in issue 93 (February 2023) of A Sort of Newsletter, the quarterly magazine of the Graham Greene Birthplace.

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Graham Greene was a great bibliophile and bookhunter, and so too are many of his readers. One of them, Zoeb Matin, hunts books by Greene and others in his home city of Bombay, as he tells us here. It was Greene himself who once equated hunting and scrabbling for rare discoveries and unexpected finds in second-hand bookshops with a ‘treasure hunt’. And that is what Zoeb has found himself pursuing – with some distinct success – across Bombay/Mumbai.

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Photographer Luis Poirot accompanied Graham Greene on his tour of Chile in 1971. Here he writes about that experience and the turbulent political situation prior to 1973 and the CIA-backed coup that removed from power the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende.

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In this article, Andrei Gorzo looks at the 30-year correspondence between Graham Greene and the Romanian poet Petre Solomon (1923-1991). For much of the Cold War, Solomon was socialist Romania’s official translator of Greene’s novels and short stories into Romanian. For Greene, relationships like this were part of the necessary work of maintaining his international reputation as a writer.

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It is a commonplace to state that Greene’s early efforts to find a career in writing encountered plenty of setbacks. However, in this article Jon Wise argues that the years between Greene going up to Oxford University and achieving his first success as a novelist with The Man Within in 1929 were not, as often supposed, a barren publishing period with nothing to show apart from one small volume of poetry. Indeed, earlier still at school in Berkhamsted, his writing was getting published. (This article first appeared in 2018 in A Sort of Newsletter, the quarterly magazine of the Graham…

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Many of the Vintage Classics paperbacks of Graham Greene’s novels come with splendid introductions by literary luminaries like Zadie Smith (The Quiet American), John Updike (The Power and the Glory), Monica Ali (The End of the Affair ) and J.M. Coetzee (Brighton Rock). Here were reprint the introduction – by Robert Macfarlane – to an often neglected Greene “entertainment”, A Gun for Sale, published in 1936. (This article first appeared in 2015 in A Sort of Newsletter, the quarterly magazine of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust edited by Mike Hill; it is reproduced here with all requisite permissions, notably The…

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Judith Adamson first published Reflections, an invaluable edited collection of Greene journalism, travelogues, essays and reviews spanning his writing career, back in 1990. Judith met Greene and even underwent what she called “trial by martini”, his test of her trust involving strong vodka martinis and wine: she passed! With an updated edition of her collection about to be published by Vintage, Judith here reflects on how Reflections came into being. (This article first appeared in A Sort of Newsletter, the magazine of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust edited by Mike Hill, in 2015. It is reproduced here with all due…

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In 1984 the arts magazine ADAM International Review devoted an entire edition to Graham Greene in celebration of his eightieth birthday. The first article was by Graham’s younger brother Hugh, reflecting on their childhood (Graham was six years older), and we are delighted to reprint it here. (This article first appeared in A Sort of Newsletter, the magazine of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust edited by Mike Hill, in 2014. It is reproduced here with all requisite permissions, including the estate of Hugh C. Greene).

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It might be supposed that all of Greene’s short stories, more than fifty of them, have been accounted for. But as Jon Wise shows, more keeping popping up, including Up-ended: A Macabre Meditation dating from 1961. Following Jon’s thoughtful introduction, we take great pleasure in reprinting the story in its entirety. (This article first appeared in A Sort of Newsletter, the magazine of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust edited by Mike Hill, in 2013. It is reproduced here with all requisite permissions).

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This piece on Greene and the Exotic is taken from David Lodge’s 1992 book The Art of Fiction, a collection of articles originally published in The Independent on Sunday the year before in which he analysed a particular aspect of literary style in the context of an extract from an author’s work. Here Lodge discusses the opening of Greene’s 1948 novel The Heart of the Matter. A fine literary analyst as well as a brilliant novelist in his own right, Lodge’s The Art of Fiction is a perceptive and important book. (This article first appeared in A Sort of Newsletter,…

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