3 Review(s)

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'.