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480 pages, Paperback
First published January 25, 2002
And suddenly I wonder: is it more of my bad luck to have been born when I was, at the beginning of this century and not be able to be young at its end? I look enviously at these kids and think about the lives they are living – and will live – and posit a kind of future for them. And then, almost immediately, I think what a futile regret that is. You must live the life you have been given. In sixty years’ time, if these boys and girls are lucky enough, they will be old men and women looking at the new generation of bright boys and girls and wishing that time had not fled by…
Greene is someone I’m really interested in as a writer and as a case study. His Catholicism seems to me to be a complete sham, just like Muriel Spark, another writer I really admire who converted to Catholicism. Waugh’s conversion, on the other hand, was genuine – he needed it – whereas the other two I think did it and then found it useful to be “Catholic Novelists”. I’ve read a great deal about both Muriel Spark and Graham Greene and they seem to me to be the most irreligious people I can imagine. They paid lip service to religion but it doesn’t wash with me.Forgive me, I just have a bit of a Muriel Spark bee in my bonnet at the moment.