After decades of silence, interrupted only by sporadic, guarded communiqués, the correspondence of Graham Greene and Kim Philby was spurred into renewed intimacy by a troubled global situation: a middle eastern state, unbalanced by regime change, had begun taking western hostages, while in nearby Afghanistan, religiously motivated guerrilla fighters threatened efforts to prop up a secular regime. The year is immediately recognisable: it is 1979.
Despite the obvious parallels, Greene and Philby’s decade-long conversation (the letters continue throughout the 1980s) takes place in a world far removed from the present: one frozen in binary opposition, during that weary interregnum before the cold war’s end. It was under such conditions that the pair reprised their 50-year friendship – and their letters should be read in the light of that era, with its great power rivalry, spheres of influence, Salt treaties and proxy wars.
If discussion of such a musty correspondence seems belated, so is its appearance in the public realm. Philby died in 1988. His letters were first flushed out by Greene’s friend, Rick Gekoski, during a visit to Philby’s widow in Moscow. The material went under the hammer at Sotheby’s, and eventually reached the Lauinger library at Georgetown University. Since then, access has been restricted to Greene’s official biographer. It is only in recent months – 15 years after publication of the first volume of Norman Sherry’s life of Greene – that the final restrictions have been lifted on the author’s papers: a relaxation prompted by agitation from Greene’s executors, other scholars, and the looming centenary of the author’s birth.
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