Graham Greene
Yes, the title of this post is an intended pun.
Your membership of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust does matter very much to us. As our official title indicates we are a charitable rather than a profit-making organisation and therefore we need our membership subscriptions in order to stay afloat so we can put on our yearly festival (incredibly, 2024 will see the 25th such event since it was first run way back in 1998) and publish our excellent magazine, A Sort of Newsletter.
Now to membership. As we posted back last November, the Trustees have been forced to put up membership fees. This is due to the increased cost of living which has affected how much the Trust has to pay in order to design, produce and distribute our quarterly magazine. BUT, if you do become a member of the Trust before 1 March you will take advantage of the old rate which has been in place for several years. It will make a small but noticeable difference.
To tempt you, next month’s issue of A Sort of Newsletter includes articles on Greene and Achill Island* (by two residents there, Angela and Stuart Maye-Banbury), Zoeb Matin on the highly unusual and mystifying short story ‘Under the Garden’, part of the A Sense of Reality collection, Tamas Molnar on the lack of credit for Greene in two books on spying, and another contribution in the popular ‘My Graham Greene Collection’ series – focusing this time on Greene’s early poetry collection, Babbling April. There is also the editor’s review of Professor Carlos Villar Flor’s book on travels with Leopoldo Duran in Spain and Portugal in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, there is the popular annual Greene quiz (which promises to be bit different this time) and a ‘Talepiece’ by David Hawksworth.
As you can see, this is a packed edition with lots of fascinating features.
Lastly, it would help us greatly, either if you are an existing member or are about to join, if we could communicate with you via email which will save noticeably on our postage costs. However, we do fully understand the importance of data protection in the current climate – as our policy on the Membership and Data Protection page demonstrates. Also, we respect the fact that some people simply do not want to use the internet for communication.
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* Graham Greene spent some time on Achill Island off the Irish coast in the early days of his relationship with Catherine Walston. The couple stayed in Walston’s very primitive cottage in this remote location. It was there that Greene put the finishing touches to one of his most famous novels, The Heart of the Matter.