'I'm just a bad writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls . . .'

Graham Greene was born in Berkhamstead, England in 1904. The fourth of six children, he was educated at Berkhamstead school, where his father was headmaster, and then at Oxford University. He went on to work as a journalist for The Times where he met Vivien Dayrell-Browning, who was instrumental in his conversion to Catholicism. They married in 1927 and had two children. Greene's first novel, The Man Within (1929), was favourably received and kick-started a prolific writing career that included the novels Brighton Rock (1938) and Our Man in Havana (1958), short stories, biographies, plays and travel books, as well as film criticism. Considered one of the leading novelists of his generation, he was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967. Greene died in Switzerland in April 1991.