Graham Greene "The Heart of the Matter" ；Lord Rochester's Monkey (1939) ；么妹 ；"The Human Factor" (1978) A Sort of Life1971 《小說家的人生》2006* Lord Rochester's Monkey(1939)

 Graham Greene "The Heart of the Matter" ；Lord Rochester's Monkey (1939) ；么妹 ；"The Human Factor" (1978)   A Sort of Life1971 《小說家的人生》2006*  Lord Rochester's Monkey(1939)

我的第一本Graham Greene小說是企鵝版的 "The Heart of the Matter" 

"The Heart of the Matter" is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1948. The story is set during World War II in a small British colonial outpost in Sierra Leone and follows the moral crisis of Henry Scobie, who serves as an assistant police commissioner. Greene, drawing from his own experiences as a former British intelligence officer in Freetown, explores themes of love, duty, and betrayal.

Scobie is portrayed as a fundamentally good man, deeply committed to his responsibilities and integrity. However, he finds himself entangled in a web of personal and professional dilemmas, including his strained marriage to Louise and his affair with a young woman named Helen. This relationship complicates his sense of duty and leads him to confront profound questions about morality, faith, and the nature of sin.

The novel delves into the complexities of human emotions and the burdens of conscience, reflecting Greene's exploration of Catholic themes. Critics often consider it part of a "Catholic trilogy" alongside Greene's earlier works, "Brighton Rock" and "The Power and the Glory." Throughout the narrative, Scobie grapples with feelings of guilt and despair, ultimately leading to a tragic conclusion that underscores the weight of his moral choices.

Greene's writing is characterized by its psychological depth and rich character development, making "The Heart of the Matter" a poignant examination of the human condition. The novel remains a significant work in Greene's oeuvre, celebrated for its exploration of the moral ambiguities faced by individuals in times of crisis.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/4hD6yAN

You can also get the audio book for FREE using the same link. Use the link to register for the audio book on Audible and start enjoying it.

所有心情：

261261

黃哲斌

【格雷安葛林，與媒體這一行】 我喜愛的英國作家格雷安葛林，在他的早年自傳《小說家的人生》裡，寫了一段有趣往事，他年輕時，曾在《諾丁罕報》擔任夜班編輯，當時編輯部的娛樂，就是每晚合資賭足球，贏者要請大家吃薯條。 葛林在書中描述，他手氣好，常贏了錢，到當地的Fish and chips小店買炸薯條，他注意到，店老闆只用《諾丁罕報》包薯條，從不用另一份報紙《諾丁罕衛報》，「因為衛報是很受尊崇的報紙」。 此處的《諾丁罕衛報》，並非當前的《衛報The Guardian》（前身為《曼徹斯特衛報》），但這個小故事，可作當前媒體困境的一則註解。.......
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黃芳田《小說家的人生》A Sort of Life 的譯文當然很可靠
缺撼是第220頁對 Lord Rochester's Monkey (1939) By Graham Greene 這本書，標點符號錯誤。

John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, was born on April 1st 1647. A poet and courtier, he was the favourite of Charles II whose wit, lasciviousness and serious intellectual interests he shared

Even to his contemporaries, Rochester was a legendary figure

John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, was born on this day in 1647

ECON.ST

• The Earl of Rochester wrote directly from his personal concerns, too. Those concerns included dildos, premature ejaculation, drunkenness, and scatology. He was very authentic.

The Earl of Rochester

出版商是看 A Sort of Life 之後，才知道Graham Greene1939年寫這奇(詩)人奇事。

我在2005年貼過一文:

Rochester's most famous verse concerned King Charles II, his great friend. In reply to his jest that:

"He never said a foolish thing, nor ever did a wise one",

Charles is reputed to have said:

"That is true -- for my words are my own, but my actions are those of my ministers."

mien

1. Bearing or manner, especially as it reveals an inner state of mind: "He was a Vietnam veteran with a haunted mien" (James Traub).

1. An appearance or aspect.

[Alteration (influenced by French mine, appearance) of Middle English demeine, demeanor, from Old French, from demener , to behave. See demean¹.]
━━ n.n. - 風采, 樣子, 態度日本語 (Japanese) 風采(ふうさい), 態度.
n. - 物腰, 態度, 風采
Français (French)mine, expression

Pepys' Diary: Wednesday 4 April 1660
The King: O, prisca fides! What can these be? Rochester: The love of wine and women.
The King: God bless your majesty!" new. Hhomeboy on Sun 6 Apr 2003, ...

Sober in govt….continued:
One of the better exchanges between Rochester and The King:
"Rochester:Were I in your Majesty's place I would not govern at all.
The King: How then?
Rochester: I would send for my good Lord Rochester and command him to govern.
The King: But the singular modesty of that nobleman-
Rochester: He would certainly conform himself to your Majesty's bright example. How gloriously would the two grand social virtues flourish under his auspices!
The King: O, prisca fides! What can these be?
Rochester: The love of wine and women.
The King: God bless your majesty!"

crest
The Family Motto is: "PRISCA FIDES" this translates to "Ancient Trust" and can
be traced to John Glassford Tobacco Lord. ...

ip·so fac·to ( ĭp'sō făk'tō) 
adv.
By the fact itself; by that very fact: An alien, ipso facto, has no right to a U.S. passport.
[New Latin ipsō factō : Latin ipsō, ablative of ipse, itself + Latin factō, ablative of factum , fact.]

September 15, 1974

A Martyr to Sin

By WALTER CLEMONS

LORD ROCHESTER'S MONKEYBy Graham Greene.

n the best known portrait of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, a pet monkey proffers a tattered page ripped from one of his master's books. The Earl, resplendent in silks, coolly awards the beast a laurel crown. "Were I...," Rochester wrote, "a spirit free, to choose for my own share/ what sort of flesh and blood I pleas'd to wear,/ I'd be a dog, a monkey or a bear,/ Or any thing but that vain animal/ Who is so proud of being rational."
For more than two centuries Rochester's notoriety as the wildest of "the merry gang" of wits who converged at Charles II's court during the 1660's overshadowed his reputation as a poet. The poetry- skeptical, parodistic, obscene and scathing- was a rediscovery of the 1920's, though John Hayward's 1926 Nonesuch edition escaped prosecution only by being limited to 1,050 copies. A scholarly biography by Vivian de Sola Pinto (1935; revised as "Enthusiast in Wit," 1962) usefully related Rochester's libertinism to Hobbesian materialism- specifically to Hobbes's doctrine that sensory experience was the only philosophical reality. Pinto pitched his claims high: "If Milton is the great poet of belief in the 17th century, Rochester is the great poet of unbelief."
Professor Pinto's book hadn't yet appeared when Graham Greene, an unsuccessful novelist in his twenties, wrote a biography of Rochester 40 years ago. It was turned down "without hesitation" by his publisher, Greene told us in his 1971 autobiography, "and I was too uncertain of myself to send it elsewhere." The typescript has now been retrieved from the University of Texas library, minimally revised and elaborately packaged by George Rainbird Ltd. of London in the format of Nancy Mitford's "The Sun King" and Angus Wilson's "The World of Charles Dickens."
"Lord Rochester's Monkey," it turns out, is Greene's best early work- a writer's book about a writer, with the vibrations of affinity we feel in Henry James's "Hawthorne" or John Berryman's "Stephen Crane." Greene, who had drawn the title of his first novel from Sir Thomas Browne- "There's another man within me that's angry with me"- responded to the discord between Cavalier and Puritan in Rochester's character, the extremities of debauchery and disgust, his personal elegance and appetite for squalor, the acrid blend of bawdry and moral fervor in his verses.
Rochester lived with extraordinary velocity. Son of a Cavalier general who had followed Charles II into exile, and of a strong willed Puritan mother, he presented himself at court at 17- "graceful, tho' tall and slender," according to an early account, "his mien and shape having something extremely engaging; and for his mind, it discovered charms not to be withstood." The next year he was in the Tower for having tried to abduct the heiress Elizabeth Mallet, whose guardians aimed to auction her in marriage to a higher bidder. Freed, he redeemed himself by bravery with the fleet against the Dutch, returned to be sworn a Gentleman of the King's Bedchamber and to elope with Elizabeth Mallet, this time successfully, when he was 19.
Of the tradition that he "was very barbarous to his own lady, tho' so very fine a woman," Greene observes that "infidelity was the full extent of his barbarity. A love story... may have lain hidden between these two young, witty and unhappy people." As he veered between country and court, Rochester's inconstancy seems to have tormented him. More than one letter to his wife is filled with tender regret: "I myself have a sense of what the methods of my life seem so utterly to contradict..."
Rochester told the historian Gibert Burnet that "for five years together he was continually drunk; not all the while under the visible effect of it." He was repeatedly banished- and as often recalled- by the King he scurrilously lampooned. Drink made him "extravagantly pleasant"; it also led to disgraces like the smashing of the royal sundial and the brawl at Epsom in which his friend Mr. Downes was killed. Greene plausibly links the most famous of Rochester's masquerades to the aftermath of the Epsom affray: he vanished from London and a mysterious Dr. Alexander Bendo- astrologer, diviner of dreams, dispenser of beauty aids and cures for women's diseases- set up shop on Tower Hill. "Dr. Bendo's" advertisement is one of the most dazzling virtuoso pieces of 17th-century prose. In its impromptu rush of quackery and Biblical cadences, its promises of marvels and its teasing challenge to distinguish the counterfeit from the real. Greene astutely notes "the cracks in the universe of Hobbes, the disturbing doubts in his disbelief, which may have been in Rochester's mind even in the midst of his masquerade, so riddled is the broadsheet with half truths."
Dating his poems is a snare, but Rochester's Songs and his best satires- "A Ramble in St. James's Park," the "Satyr Against Reason and Mankind," "A Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country," "The Maim'd Debauchee"- all seem to have been written before he turned 29. Thereafter "an embittered and thoughtful man who would die in 1680 of old age at 33," he seldom appeared at court. In his last year he debated theology with the Anglican Gilbert Burnet and underwent a religious conversion, the authenticity of which was impugned when Burnet published his account of it but which Greene, like Vivian de Sola Pinto, believes to have been genuine. "The hand of God touched him," Burnet wrote- "but," Greene characteristically adds, "it did not touch him through the rational arguments of a cleric. If God appeared at the end, it was the sudden secret appearance of a thief... without reason, an act of grace."
Rochester is thus the earliest of Graham Greene's black sheep heroes, far more powerfully drawn than the protagonists of the novels Greene was writing at this time ("The Man Within," "Rumour at Nightfall," "The Name of Action"). Facets of Rochester's character will reappear in the dangerous Pinky in "Brighton Rock," the whisky priest, the remorseful husband in "The Heart of the Matter," the God-thwarted amorist in "The End of the Affair." At Rochester's funeral the chaplain preached an unusual sermon: "He seemed to affect something singular and paradoxical in his impieties, as well as in his writings, above the reach and thought of other men... Nay, so confirmed was he in sin, that he oftentimes almost died a martyr for it."
"Lord Rochester's Monkey," with a bibliography containing no item more recent than 1931, is going to catch hell from some scholars. Greene gracefully acknowledges Pinto's work ("I have no wish to rewrite my biography at Professor Pinto's expense") and sideswipes David M. Vieth's 1968 "The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester" (Yale University Press): "As Mr. Vieth admits the attribution to a great many poems depends on subjective judgment, and out ears often differ... Rochester's poems from his death on became more indecent with every year, and I have the impression that Mr. Vieth is inclined to prefer the hotter versions." But 40 years' work on the dating and ascription of Rochester's writings (by Pinto, John Harold Wilson, James Thorpe, Frank H. Ellis, Vieth and others) has left Greene in a number of unprotected positions.
Four out of five verse citations on a single page, during a discussion of Rochester's marriage, are now pretty reliably believed not to be Rochester's. Misdating a letter blunts its fine edge of sarcasm: when Rochester wrote, "My passion for living is so increased that I omit no care of myself... The King, who knows me to be a very ill-natured man, will not think it an easy matter for me to die, now I live chiefly out of spite," it now appears he was not referring to the false report of his death in 1678 but to the King's premature appointment, three years earlier, of Rochester's successor to the lifetime post of the Ranger of Woodstock Park. When Rochester wonders at the enmity of the Duchess of Portsmouth, Greene remarks, "He had forgotten 'Portsmouth's Mirror'" -a poem containing allusions to events after his death.
These lapses disfigure the book but cannot wreck it. Greene's intuition of character yields insights that academic caution might prohibit. He is at his keenest in a chapter on Elizabeth Barry, the London actress who bore Rochester a daughter remembered in his will. Her fellow players despaired of her; she had "not a musical ear" and could not master the declamatory tragedy-queen style. Undertaking her training on a bet, Rochester "caused her to enter into the meaning of every sentiment... and adapt her whole behavior to the situations of the characters." (Professor Pinto loses his head and tells us "we can see here the beginnings of a new art of the theatre that was to culminate in the naturalistic drama of Ibsen, Shaw and Chekov.")
Mrs. Barry became one of the great actresses of her time, unequalled in the art of exciting pity, Colley Cibber said. And notorious offstage, Greene adds, for her combination of immorality and coldness. Thirty-four undated letters to "slattern Betty Barry" exist in print, though not in manuscript. Greene shifts these into a pattern of his own, speculating that she inspired the famous lyric "An age in her embraces past/ Would seem a winter's day"- with its piercing observation that while pleasure may be mistaken for true love, "pain can ne'er deceive." It is a convincing feat of historical imagination. Greene's claim for his Rochester is justified: "So complex a character can be 'dramatized' (in James's sense) in more ways than one. The longer I worked on his life the more living he became to me."

Walter Clemons is an editor of Newsweek.

side・swipesideswipe (REMARK)
noun [C]
a remark attacking something or someone made while talking about something else:
During her lecture on her discoveries, she made/took several sideswipes at the management.
━━ n., v. 横なぐり（する）; ことのついでの非難.sideswipe (HIT) Show phoneticsverb [T]
to hit on the side:
The motorcycle turned the corner too quickly, and sideswiped a car coming towards it.

at the expense of sb (ALSO at sb's expense)
making another person look foolish:
Would you stop making jokes at my expense?
cadence n. （詩の）リズム; （声の）抑揚; 【楽】終止法.
rang・er
━━ n. 歩き回る人; 騎馬パトロール隊員; 〔米〕 森林警備隊員; 〔英〕 御料林監視官; 〔米〕 （普通R-） 特別奇襲隊員; 〔英〕 ガールスカウト(Girl Guides)の最年長組の少女.
 ranger oneself　（結婚などで）身を固める; 味方する ((with)).
━━ n. 賭(か)け（金，の対象）; 有力候補; 期待に添うもの; 〔話〕 予想; 意見.
 one's best bet　最も確実なこと.
 hedge [cover] one's bets　2度賭けをする.
━━ v. （～(・ted); -tt-） 賭ける ((on, against)).
 bet one's boots [bottom dollar, shirt] on (that) 　〔話〕 …を確信する, 間違いなく…だと思う.
 I ('ll) bet　〔話〕 間違いない; 〔反語〕 ほんとかなあ.
 You bet!　〔俗〕 きっと; 〔米俗〕 どう致しまして.
 You bet?　きっとか.

"Naked she lay, claspt in my longing Arms,
I fill'd with Love, and she all over Charms,
Both equally inspir'd with eager fire,
Melting through kindness, flaming in desire;
With Arms, Legs, Lips, close clinging to embrace,
She clips me to her Breast, and sucks me to her Face.
The nimble Tongue (Love's lesser Lightning) plaid
Within my Mouth, and to my thoughts convey'd
Swift Orders, that I should prepare to throw
The All dissolving Thunderbolt below.
My flutt'ring Soul, sprung with the pointed Kiss,
Hangs hov'ring o're her Balmy Lips of Bliss."
--from "The Imperfect Enjoyment" (1680) by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647 - 1680)


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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkhamstead

Famous people born in Berkhamsted include the novelist Graham Greene (1904–1991), whose father was headmaster of Berkhamsted School, which Greene attended. One of Greene's novels, The Human Factor, set there and mentions several places in the town, including Kings Road and Berkhamsted Common. In his autobiography, Greene wrote that he has been moulded in a special way "through Berkhamsted". Greene's life and works are celebrated annually during the last weekend in September with a festival organised by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust.^[40]


Greene獻給他的么妹

Everyman's Library

Henry Graham Greene died in Vevey, Switzerland on this day in 1991 (aged 86).

"Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt."
--from "The Human Factor" (1978) by Graham Greene

Graham Greene’s passion for moral complexity and his stylistic aplomb were perfectly suited to the cat-and mouse game of the spy novel, a genre he practically invented and to which he periodically returned while fashioning one of the twentieth century’s longest, most triumphant literary careers. Written late in his life, The Human Factor displays his gift for suspense at its most refined level, and his understanding of the physical and spiritual vulnerability of the individual at its deepest.

小說家的人生
A Sort of Life

類別： 文學小說
叢書系列：藍小說
作者：格雷安‧葛林
Graham Greene
譯者：黃芳田
出版社：時報文化
出版日期：2006年

「才華洋溢對整個世代發言的大作家」──亞歷‧堅尼斯 「寫《小說家的人生》……有如做心理分析。我在時空裡做了一趟漫長旅程，自己也成為我筆下的人物之一。」──摘自葛雷安‧葛林與瑪麗-芙蘭絲瓦絲‧亞蘭的對話。 「很美妙地觀察並書寫了他的人生背景。我對他比以前更加欣賞──熟練的技巧與簡練文字；他灌注的興奮感不僅限於敘述裡，而是所有字句之中，使得文字自行產生出跳動節奏與文采。」──《觀察家》 「親切宜人之作，一本和婉的書，出於一位傑出者之手，但他卻刻意要表現出自己並非特別傑出……他的確名副其實。」──《每日電訊報》

內　容　簡　介

《小說家的人生》主要寫他的童年與啟蒙歷程，時間放在1910~1920年 代的英倫，騷動不安的年代與痛苦的童年求學交錯著，少年葛林並不快樂，逃離學校的欲望就像他後來人生一連串逃離的開始，如果呼應葛林曾說的「童年是小說家 的存款」這句話，讀者從這本書就能想像葛林從童年源源不絕提出的巨額存款會是什麼光景。寫作這一段生命時光，據葛林自己說相當艱難，他曾經因為想寫篇關於 學校的小說，重訪小學現場，結果因為受不了重溫這些年的生活所受的精神折磨而放棄，並寫道：身處剛果的痲瘋病患聚居地，都比年少時待過的小學好過。 但是即便這麼的煎熬，葛林果然是葛林，就像他對諾門雪莉教授寫作他的傳記時唯一的要求：「沒有謊言，記錄到我死的那一天。」他對自傳的寫作想法是既尋常也非比尋常： 在 六十六年的人生歲月裡，我花在虛構人物與真實男女身上的光陰幾乎一樣多。說真的，雖然我很幸運擁有為數眾多的朋友，但卻不記得任何朋友的趣聞軼事，不管他 們是名人還是惡名昭彰的人──我能依稀記得的故事就是我寫過的那些故事。 那麼我紀錄這些往事點滴卻又為何呢？這就跟造就我成為小說家的動機差不多：渴望把紊亂的經歷理出一點頭緒來，同時也出於深切的好奇心。據那些神學家教導 說，除非我們多少學會先愛自己，否則無法去愛別人，而好奇心也是初始於家裡的。──引自格雷安葛林所著《小說家的人生》 (A Sort of Life,1971) 閱讀這樣的作家人生，讓我們重新想見那樣的美好時光：那時候作者還不被視為出版行銷的一環，但是，他們是我們這些讀者人生重要想法的一環。

作　者　簡　介

格雷安‧葛林（Graham Greene） 生於一九○四年。牛津大學貝利奧爾學院畢業之後，在《泰晤士報》做過四年副編輯。他的第四本小說《史坦堡特快車》使他聲譽大起。 除 了寫出很多本長篇小說外，葛林也寫了好幾本短篇小說集、四本遊記、六齣舞台劇、三本自傳──《小說家的人生》、《逃避途徑》、《我自己的世界》（出版於他 逝世之後）──兩本傳記以及四本童書。他也為報章雜誌寫過幾百篇雜文、影評、書評，有些收錄在《沉思錄》和《黑暗中的早晨》文集裡。他寫的長篇和短篇小說 很多都拍成了電影，其中《黑獄亡魂》還寫成電影腳本。葛雷安‧葛林曾獲功績勳章以及榮譽侍從榮銜。一九九一年四月去世。

譯　者 簡 介

▼ 譯者簡介 黃芳田，台灣高雄市人，國立師範大學國文系畢業，曾任職教師、文字記者、自由採訪記者、專欄作家，現居香港，以翻譯為業。譯有《印度沒有句點》、《香港》、《蕨樂園》、《可以這樣老去》等。 著有：《辭職去旅行》、《筆尖下的鏡頭》、《踏著音符去旅行》、《追蹤奧德賽》、《in italiano中文補充教材》。

A sort of life [Hardcover]

Graham Greene (Author)

Product Description

Graham Green was born into a veritable tribe of Greenes - six children, eventually, and sic cousins - based in Berkhamstead at the public school where his father was headmaster. In A SORT OF LIFE Greene recalls schooldays and Oxford, adolescent encounters with psychoanalysis and Russian roulette, his marriage and conversion to Catholicism, and how he rashly resigned from The Times when his first novel, THE MAN WITHIN was published in 1929. A SORT OF LIFE, like its companion volume, WAYS OF ESCAPE, combines reticence with candour and reveals, brilliantly and compellingly, the genesis of a life lived and an art obsessed by 'the dangerous edge of things. . the narrow boundary between lovalty and disloyalty, between fidelity and infidelity, the mind's contradictions, the paradox one carries within oneself'. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 220 pages
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster (1971) 
• A muse on the tides of history
  

  Elizabeth Dennys

  •  
• By Christopher Hawtree
• theguardian.com, Wednesday 10 February 1999 04.29 GMT

There are people with whom one immediately feels a rapport, the certainty that one will know them forever. So it was with Elisabeth Dennys, who has died aged 84, as she stood in the doorway of her Sussex house one morning in the autumn of 1988. She was in her mid-seventies, but could have been far younger: tall, slim, with that smile and blue, exophthalmic eyes characteristic of the Greene family.

I was visiting to look at her brother Graham's papers for an edition of his letters to the press. We talked about many things, and the files of Greene's papers spread across the floor. Pepper, my dog, had no idea of the value which Greene's handwriting conferred on them; it seemed that they were spread about for her comfort, and she promptly sat down. I was mortified, but Elisabeth beamed - her smile was magical, and it charmed people across the generations.

It was a shock, a few months later, to hear that she had suffered a stroke at the wheel of her car. One cannot imagine anything worse than the condition which she endured for 10 years after that. Able only to utter a few sounds, and unable to walk or to move one arm, she had an initial despair, but - as throughout her life - she regained a certain serenity. Her brother Graham's great friend, Yvonne Cloetta, maintains that he never got over the shock of her stroke, and that his own health deteriorated from then on.

Not only Graham's death in 1991 did she survive, but also that of her husband, Rodney, in 1993, after he too had suffered a stroke: he would manage to get from his wheelchair to bed each night and a nurse tucked them up together.

Born in Berkhamsted, Elisabeth was one of six children, several of whom became eminent in the diverse but overlapping worlds of fiction, broadcasting, climbing, medicine and the secret service. Ten years younger than Graham, she enjoyed an at first necessarily remote relationship with him.

Being the youngest, she became imbued with a certain power of observation and empathy: quietly, she was the rock on which many lives depended. After going to school at Downe House and taking a secretarial course, she joined MI6 at Bletchley in November 1938, and worked for Captain Cuthbert Bowlby until he became head of Middle East secret intelligence in Cairo, where she rejoined him in the autumn of 1941. On the convoy out, she and other women had to lock in his cabin the ship's libidinous skipper. Not that there was any doubting her passionate nature: as her great friend Rozanne Colchester, another MI6 wife, has said, Elisabeth was extremely attractive to men, and attracted by them.

Meanwhile, at Bletchley she had met the man, Rodney Dennys, who would become her husband after his great escape from under Nazi noses in Holland.

Unrecorded by Graham Greene's biographers is the fact that Elisabeth was in close contact with him again by the late-1930s. As Yvonne Cloetta records, he told her "il serait tombe amoureux de cette belle jeune femme seduisante si elle n'avait ete sa propre soeur."
 he would fall in love with this beautiful young seductive woman if she had not been his own sister


She was responsible for the SIS engaging him and - more problematically - Malcolm Muggeridge as an unlikely double-act across Africa. Greene later dedicated The Human Factor to her, "who cannot deny some responsibility". As for his Sierra Leone experience, this brought him the material for his first big-selling novel, The Heart Of The Matter, and worldwide fame.

Elisabeth's war years were spent between Cairo and Algiers. She and Cuthbert Bowlby worked on evacuation plans for Cairo, and her letters to her mother were used by Michael Ondaatje as background for The English Patient. Her meeting again with Rodney Dennys was the stuff of romance. She had gone on a jaunt to an out-of-bounds section of desert by the Suez Canal and faced prosecution, from which he saved her: he pointed out that those who had reported her were also off-limits. In 1944 they began a very happy marriage.

Elisabeth, and the children who soon followed, travelled with Dennys from one MI6 posting to another - in Egypt, Turkey and Paris. In what seemed a surprising career move to some, Rodney left the secret service in 1957 to pursue a passion for heraldry, in the College of Arms. He and Elisabeth found and renovated a house which overlooks the Sussex Downs.
As their children (a son and two daughters, who survive her) left, Elisabeth went through a low phase. She had hopes of writing fiction set in Tudor times, but it would not work. In the summer of 1975, Graham Greene's secretary retired, and, in an inspired move, he suggested that Elisabeth take on the job.


The routine of his work in Antibes, Capri and Paris depended upon somebody to field the myriad inquiries and demands upon his time. Their minds were in perfect harmony, as she could tell what would attract him. He either taped letters for typing onto signed paper or dictated urgent ones over the telephone: concise, witty and masterly.

Shortly before his death, Graham Greene arranged for his annotated library and manuscripts to be sold to help the family pay for the young carers who looked after Elisabeth at home. These were invariably from Australia or New Zealand, and travelling in Europe: they fell under her great charm - often returning for another spell. There was one exception: on his last visit to England, Greene stayed at a bed-and-breakfast place nearby, and, as he thought, would put a more severe-minded person at her ease with tales of his smoking opium in Saigon: with no idea who he was, she wondered what sort of household this could be, and soon left.

A cherished memory is of Elisabeth ringing up after she had heard that Pepper had died. I could not really understand what she was saying. That did not matter. Her spirit had always transcended words. In her work and her life, she never pushed herself forward, but her great kindness was built upon true strength and determination. No biographer can understand the brother she loved dearly without taking account of their relationship. Yvonne Cloetta gets it exactly right: she was struck by the similarity of their facial expressions, pleasant but firm, "avec une pointe d'ironie toujours presente. La complicite - pour ne pas dire la connivance - entre eux etait si flagrante qu'elle ne pouvait echapper a personne. Leur finesse d'esprit intuitive et discrete rendait les discours inutiles et superflus. Ils se comprenaient a mi-mots."

 "with a touch of irony always present the complicity -. if not the connivance - between them was so obvious that no one could escape their finesse intuitive and discreet spirit made ​​unnecessary and superfluous They talk.. is included in mid-word. "