Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Graham Greene Against the World

newrepublic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–19 of 19 posts

Re: Graham Greene Against the World

#11

Post by crossroadsguy »

janeroe wrote: post #3
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #2

> When Kim Philby was reviled as a mole for the USSR at MI6 (where he had been Greene’s drinking buddy and supervisor), Greene was the only notable British figure to visit the disgraced Philby in Russia, or attend his funeral in 1988. As Beatrice Severn declares near the end of Greene’s funniest novel, Our Man in Havana (1958): “I don’t care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations.…

> an NKVD agent and vice-consul in Istanbul, requested political asylum in Britain ... [and] ... offered the names of three Soviet agents inside Britain, two of whom worked in the Foreign Office and a third who worked in counter-espionage in London. > Philby was given the task of dealing with [the NKVD agent] by British intelligence. He warned the Soviets of the attempted defection and travelled personally to Istanbu…

A lot of these people were driven by vanity, need, arrogance, ambition, narcissism, greed, ideology, biases etc.

Well, these sounds familiar.

Re: Graham Greene Against the World

#13

Post by kencausey »

mycologos wrote: post #12

Off-topic, but did anyone else see this entire thread previously? All of the comments here are listed as posted "3 hours ago", but I'm pretty sure I saw them all much more than 3 hours ago?

This was posted yesterday and I believe it was 're-upped' by HN admins which happens occasionally to posts that I assume they believe would receive more attention if posted at another time. I did not notice the comments at the time and so cannot confirm or deny your theory about the comments. I had assumed that comments to 're-upped' posts (my term, probably not correct) did not accompany the post, but I may be wrong.

Re: Graham Greene Against the World

#14

Post by mycologos »

kencausey wrote: post #13
mycologos wrote: post #12

Off-topic, but did anyone else see this entire thread previously? All of the comments here are listed as posted "3 hours ago", but I'm pretty sure I saw them all much more than 3 hours ago?

This was posted yesterday and I believe it was 're-upped' by HN admins which happens occasionally to posts that I assume they believe would receive more attention if posted at another time. I did not notice the comments at the time and so cannot confirm or deny your theory about the comments. I had assumed that comments to 're-upped' posts (my term, probably not correct) did not accompany the post, but I may be wrong…

Ah, if I access these comments from the comments pages of the users who posted them, the "3 hours ago" timestamp becomes "1 day ago", so that seems to resolve things. Thanks!

Re: Graham Greene Against the World

#15

Post by kencausey »

mycologos wrote: post #14
kencausey wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was posted yesterday and I believe it was 're-upped' by HN admins which happens occasionally to posts that I assume they believe would receive more attention if posted at another time. I did not notice the comments at the time and so cannot confirm or deny your theory about the comments. I had assumed that comments to 're-upped' posts (my term, probably not correct) did not accompany the post, but I may be wrong…

Ah, if I access these comments from the comments pages of the users who posted them, the "3 hours ago" timestamp becomes "1 day ago", so that seems to resolve things. Thanks!

Cool, it didn't occur to me to check that.

Re: Graham Greene Against the World

#16

Post by eplanit »

motohagiography wrote: post #8
janeroe wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an NKVD agent and vice-consul in Istanbul, requested political asylum in Britain ... [and] ... offered the names of three Soviet agents inside Britain, two of whom worked in the Foreign Office and a third who worked in counter-espionage in London. > Philby was given the task of dealing with [the NKVD agent] by British intelligence. He warned the Soviets of the attempted defection and travelled personally to Istanbu…

"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" was a thinly fictionalized retelling of this period. John le Carré's contempt for the people in the organizations he wrote about could be seen as a reaction to the excesses of the era Greene wrote about. Perhaps by necessity, these aren't good people. The le Carré view can be summarized as, for that business you need people who only need the justification of the approval of their handle…

Near the end of "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" the Alec Lemus character says this exactly. It's a theme Le Carre makes clear.

Re: Graham Greene Against the World

#17

Post by dhosek »

overscore wrote: post #6
chrischapman wrote: post #5

Well, this is bit strange. Apparently I can buy two books about the life of Graham Greene, both by the same author - Richard Greene. One is called "The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene" (512 pages) published Nov 2020 [1] and the other is called "Russian Roulette: A brilliant new life of Graham Greene" (602 pages) published Sep 2020 [2]. Which one do I buy? [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unquiet-Englishman-Li…

According to his Twitter bio, it depends on your location but it's the same book. > His biography of Graham Greene will be released this autumn in the UK as Russian Roulette and in the US as The Unquiet Englishman. From: https://twitter.com/richardgreene2

Yep, it was retitled for the US market. That, incidentally, happened with a number of Greene's earlier novels (A Gun for Sale, for example, became This Gun for Hire). Later U.S. editions restored the original titles. Interestingly, a request from the publisher to retitle his late novel, The Human Factor, led to Greene changing publishers so while everything before that was published by Viking Penguin, beginning with The Human Factor, his U.S. publisher was Simon & Schuster (and later Reinhardt Books, owned by a friend, for his last novel and the miscellaneous books that gathered many of his uncollected shorter writings).

Re: Graham Greene Against the World

#18

Post by sn41 »

Graham Greene is my favorite writer. Somewhere in his autobiographies (perhaps "A sort of life") he mentions a Swiss teacher who counted words in a sentence always trying to reduce them. Greene says it had tremendous influence on his writing.

An example of such economical sentences is in the preface of A Sort of Life on why an autobiography is somewhat limited versus biographies- "it begins later and ends prematurely."

Post reply on HN