House of the week Hampshire, £3.5 millionAlthough it looks like a historic country seat, with its Palladian pillars and Georgian-inspired façade, the Water
Our Man in the Stacks
Richard Greene
NEAR THE END of his sympathetic biography of Graham Greene, Richard Greene (no relation) evokes an “odd tableau” from August 1980, when the author met with El Salvadoran rebels in a Panama City hotel room to negotiate the release of a South African hostage:
[W]hile discussing the fate of [kidnapped ambassador] Archibald Dunn, Greene and [rebel leader Salvador] Cayetano sat separated from each other by the bed, on which Greene had earlier laid the page proofs of Mark Amory’s edition of
The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. It was the sort of thing that happened in Greene’s life; he had, after all, been handed a Tintin book in the bell tower at Phat Diem.