‘No man is a success to himself’ wrote Graham Greene. I am feeling this acutely, as I turn 60 on September 1st and enter the Decade of Reckoning for uncomfortable life truths. As somebody whose literary ambition was only wanting to be a bestselling English social novelist, it’s been creeping up on me that if one hasn’t written that Big Novel by one’s sixth decade, then perhaps throwing in the quill is the only dignified thing to do.  

In a desk drawer in my study, there is a cream envelope, postmarked September 1987. That August, I found myself sitting two tables from the Graham Greene in Chez Feliz, a fish restaurant just inside the walls of the old Antibes port.  He was 82, and lunching with his mistress Yvonne Cloetta.  

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The following day I returned with a copy of a short story I had written in an envelope marked ‘c/o Monsieur Greene’ and handed it to Felix, Le Patron. Two weeks later, back at home in Shropshire, I received a typed letter from Greene, signed with his spidery writing, saying that he liked the story ‘very much’ and it promised well for my literary future. He advised me on how to get published. I was 18 and blindly imagined that literary success came easily.   

How different it all seemed back in the whirligig of the late 1980s when I read English at........

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