Graham Greene played Russian roulette as a bored teenager, joined the Communist Party hoping for a free trip to Russia, converted to Catholicism to marry a woman who had written to correct his theology, and spied for MI6 under Kim Philby, later exposed as a Soviet double agent. This episode follows the novelist from his painful childhood as the headmaster’s son at Berkhamsted, through six months of psychoanalysis at age sixteen in 1920, to the faith and darkness that shaped The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair.

We look at how Greene divided his books into entertainments and novels, why he hated being called a Catholic novelist, and how a private audience with Pope Paul VI answered the Vatican’s warning about his alcoholic priest. The discussion covers his restless travels to Liberia, Mexico, Vietnam, and Duvalier’s Haiti, the term Greeneland he despised, his novella-first approach to writing The Third Man, his affair with Catherine Walston, his courier work for Castro’s rebels, the Nobel Prize that never came, and the Nice corruption pamphlet that was vindicated after his death in 1991.

• How childhood bullying, suicide attempts, and early psychoanalysis shaped Greene’s view of human duality
• The argumentative conversion to Catholicism and why it gave him a framework for the dark
• Working for MI6 in Sierra Leone under Kim Philby and what that betrayal confirmed
• The strict 500-words-a-day routine one friend called his daily penance
• Why the Swedish Academy repeatedly shortlisted Greene but never awarded him the Nobel