Graham Greene

Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a Catholic novelist rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair and The Power and the Glory. But it is his later works such as The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and The Comedians that show an avid interest in the workings of international politics and espionage.

Throughout his life, Greene travelled far from England, to what he called the world's wild and remote places. The travels led to him being recruited into MI6 by his sister, Elisabeth, who worked for the organisation, and he was posted to Sierra Leone during the Second World War. Kim Philby, who would later be revealed as a Soviet double agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6. As a novelist, he wove the characters he met and the places where he lived into the fabric of his novels. The biography reveals that Greene continued reporting to British intelligence until his death, allowing literary scholars and readers to entertain the provocative question of whether Graham Greene was a novelist who also was a spy, or a spy for whom a life-long novelist's career was the perfect cover.