Stephen Amidon
The Spirit of Grim Grin
The Man Within My Head: Graham Greene, My Father and Me
By Pico Iyer
Bloomsbury 242pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
With the possible exception of Ernest Hemingway, no twentieth-century novelist casts a greater spell over the imaginations of aspiring male writers than Graham Greene. Working without allegiance to a specific ideology, nation or woman, he gave us stories that seamlessly melded thematic profundity with thriller-like adventure plots. Whether they admitted it or not, writers as diverse as Paul Theroux and John le Carré developed in Greene’s long shadow.
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