Richard Greene
The Cuban Connection
Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene’s Cold War Spy Novel
By Christopher Hull
Pegasus Books 338pp £19.99
‘Poor Father. Are we on the edge of ruin?’ Milly Wormold wants a horse and her father, a seller of vacuum cleaners, assumes he must get it for her. For want of money he takes up the invitation of a spy named Hawthorne to join MI6 and begins to weave an intricate fantasy of spooks, killers, lovers, dancers and missile emplacements. That is the plot of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, published in October 1958, shortly before Fidel Castro drove the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista into exile and four years before American U2 spy planes spotted Soviet missiles in Cuba.
Greene gets a lot of credit for predicting the Cuban Missile Crisis, from people who presumably don’t understand the book. In his novel the missiles are a hoax that MI6 ought to have detected. But Greene did prophesy something that lay forty-five years in the future: the sexed-up
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk