Sun, sea and spooks

Cuba meant a lot to Graham Greene. Behind his writing desk in his flat in Antibes he had a painting by the Cuban artist René Portocarrero, presented to him by Fidel Castro, who had signed his name on the back, so that Greene didn’t know which way to hang it.

Another prize possession was a tatty Penguin copy of Our Man in Havana, kept together by Sellotape, which the Russian cosmonaut Georgy Grechko had read in outer space, and in which, while circumnavigating our planet, Grechko had underlined the places in Havana that he had visited. ‘I’ve been reading it all my life, both on earth and in space,’ he wrote in his inscription when presenting the paperback to Greene in 1985. ‘I’ve learned it by heart.’

Greene’s 1958 novel, filmed soon afterwards by Carol Reed, was a satire of British foreign policy in the wake of our national humiliation over Suez — so not a world away from the situation we face today.