SOURCE: "Graham Cracker," in The New Republic, January 23, 1989, pp. 28-31.

In the following review, Pryce-Jones criticizes Greene's political loyalties and offers unfavorable assessment of The Captain and the Enemy.

Within living memory, broad-chested and vigorous John Bull has become the skulking and down-at-heel Englishman who feels sorry for himself. How was it possible to have engineered poverty and called it socialism? How was it possible to have turned one's back on millions of needy people abroad and called it decolonization? Graham Greene is not answerable for developments of this kind, but as the most prestigious and long-living writer of his generation, he did more than his fair share to generate the atmosphere that seemed to justify decay and doom. He has uniquely romanticized failure. A future Gibbon will quarry Greene's collected works for The Decline and Fall of Great Britain.

To feel sorry for oneself is perhaps a...