Appreciation …

… Graham Greene: The Middlebrow Genius | National Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

One thing that The Unquiet English­man makes clear is that Graham Greene was as strange as the characters in his novels. The original British edition of the book is called “Russian Roulette,” a game Greene claimed to have played for real and that he played, metaphorically speaking, in countless other ways. In addition to being a heavy drinker and frequent drug abuser (opium seems to have been his preferred tipple) who made several suicide attempts and suffered from what Richard Greene diagnoses, I think accurately, as a case of bipolar disorder, he was also what we now call a sex addict, congenitally incapable of any form of monogamy. All things considered, it’s a wonder that he died not at the hands of a vengeful husband or lover but in a hospital bed at the august age of 86.