A Sort of Life

Graham Greene's "long journey through time" began in 1904, when he was born into a veritable tribe of Greenes - six children, eventually, and six cousins - based in Berkhamsted at the public school where his father was headmaster. In this autobiography, 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 the genesis of a life lived and an art obsessed by "the dangerous edge of things, the narrow boundary between loyalty and disloyalty, between fidelity and infidelity, the mind's contradiction, the paradox one carries within oneself".