Michael Mewshaw’s 'My Man in Antibes' is an entertaining, moving memoir, spiced with intriguing literary anecdotes about his sometimes fraught friendship with Graham Greene.
What it was like going to Bath s Theatre Royal for the first time since Covid began
We went to see A Splinter of Ice which is showing at Theatre Royal Bath
Oliver Ford Davies, Karen Ascoe, Stephen Boxer in A Splinter of Ice (Image: James Findlay)
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SOMETIME in 2014, I was reading Yvonne Cloetta’s memoir of her life with Graham Greene when I came across a chapter dealing with his relationship with the Soviet spy Kim Philby, who she described as the “one man for whom Graham committed himself totally.”
This sparked my interest, as I knew about Greene and I knew about Philby but I didn’t know that they’d been friends, ever since Greene had worked under Philby at MI6 during the war. Or that Greene had been the only person to defend Philby after he defected to Russia in 1963.
Or that Greene had been to see him in Moscow in the late 1980s, thus satisfying Philby’s long-standing and publicly stated desire “to sit across a table from Graham Greene with a bottle of wine between us.”
Travels with Graham Greene — the remarkable life and times of a master storyteller cbc.ca - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cbc.ca Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Has any other novelist lived a life so steeped in political intrigue?
Evening Standard/Getty Images
March 10, 2021
The last novelist who acted like he might save the world may have been Graham Greene. He belonged to a generation of writers who might not always share the same political opinions but who supported many of the same causes: defending jailed dissidents, protesting illegal wars, and challenging the unfairness (or even stupidity) of censoring great books. He wrote a novel,
The Comedians, and developed its film adaptation with the intention of helping to “isolate” Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier, who contemplated having Greene assassinated in retaliation. At one point, Greene was so celebrated that the South African State Department asked him to negotiate the release of a kidnapped ambassador in El Salvador. (Greene eventually came to an agreement with the rebels, but the ambassador was killed anyway for reasons that were never fully understood.) By the end of his life,