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I haven't read Machines Like Me, but Atonement is one of my all-time favorite novels. To give you an idea of my general tastes, I'm drawn towards late 19th and

• JNRowe 4y ago
  Graham Greene's wikipedia article is a wonderful rabbit hole of weirdness and apparent coincidence¹. Famous spies, well-known con artists, involvement in huge moments in history, etc. ¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Greene https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Greene
  • lioeters 4y ago
    Some of the tasty nuggets from his biography.. > In 1941, the travels led to his being recruited into MI6 by his sister, Elisabeth, who worked for the agency. Accordingly, he was posted to Sierra Leone during the Second World War. Kim Philby, who would later be revealed as a Soviet agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6. Greene resigned from MI6 in 1944. > ..In 1953, the Holy Office informed Greene that The Power and the Glory was damaging to the reputation of the priesthood; but later, in a private audience with Greene, Pope Paul VI told him that, although parts of his novels would offend some Catholics, he should ignore the criticism. > ..In the late 1950s, as inspiration for his novel, A Burnt-Out Case (1960), Greene spent time travelling around Africa visiting a number of leper colonies in the Congo Basin and in what were then the British Cameroons. > In 1957, just months after Fidel Castro began his final revolutionary assault on the Batista regime in Cuba, Greene played a small role in helping the revolutionaries, as a secret courier transporting warm clothing for Castro's rebels hiding in the hills during the Cuban winter.