One of the few pleasures of being unemployed is the opportunity to read. For the last couple of years, I have not really had as much time for books as I would have liked, unlike in the old days when, as an academic, I could read at length and be content that I was doing my duty.

Amongst the books that had piled up unread in recent days was a selection of the letters of Graham Greene which had been given to me for Christmas. He is one of the few novelists writing in the latter part of the twentieth century whom I thought qualified to be considered great. Typically, given my old fashioned predilections, he had actually started writing well before the Second World War, like most of those I admire. However, he continued to create and to comment well into the modern world, and is perhaps the most distinguished literary exponent of the period of the Cold War.

That period of hostility has been characterized in different ways, but essentially the ‘war’ was between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, involving too the allies of both these super-powers. Initially the West, as the US faction was described, saw itself in the period immediately after the Second World War as championing democracy versus authoritarianism, but during the fifties, this also shaded into promoting capitalism versus communism.