WHEREAS, AN AMERICAN TURNS IN BRIGID O'SHAUGHNESSY:

Greeneland is commonly a frontier zone in the back of beyond where the pervading smell is the police station; the usual time of day the pink-gin hour on the veranda; the only certainties those possessed by children. Over the border posts, God and the Devil wheel like vultures, and a loose fence separates the good man from the bad. For the rest of his life, Greene was attracted to this torrid region like a bluebottle.

A paradox of Greene is his constant buzzing after a borderland which might promise not only escapist thrills but equilibrium -- and where, like his double agent Maurice Castle in The Human Factor, 'he could be accepted as a citizen without any pledge of faith, not in the City of God or Marx, but the City called Peace of Mind'. Yet it was in his unsettled personality always to take sides, 'even if my choice might only be for a lesser evil'. Hence his frequently incendiary remarks about America's foreign policy, such as this corker involving Panama's pock-marked dictator, Manuel Noriega: 'If I have to choose between a drug dealer and United States imperialism, I prefer the drug dealer.'

It was an article of Greene's congested faith that relationships with individuals were more important than those with countries. Even so, Greene routinely betrayed or declined involvement with those closest to him -- his wife, his two children, his lovers. 'I wish I could stop being a bastard,' he wrote to Catherine Walston, his most passionate mistress. Unsurprisingly, this streak of disloyalty, which he interpreted with characteristic perversity as a virtue in others, contributed to regular bouts of self-loathing and thoughts of suicide.

It was easier to help strangers -- which maybe explains his generosity towards underdogs and dissidents, and, most controversially, his stubborn loyalty to Philby, under whom he had served in wartime intelligence. Still, Richard Greene questions the moral principle behind it: 'It suggests a failure of imagination; one cannot put a value on the pains of people one has never met, and that is what novelists claim to do in their art.' Likewise, he finds dubious Greene's argument for the moral equivalence of crimes committed by the East and West. 'Even allowing for the outrages of American foreign policy, it is hard to equate them with those of Stalin and his successors.' Perhaps Greene's deeper flaw was to confuse his preeminence as a writer with a degree of political thinking he did not possess.

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