John Spurling was born in Kenya in 1936 and educated in England at Marlborough College and St John's College, Oxford. His many plays have been performed on TV, radio and stage, including at the National Theatre. Among his novels are The Ten Thousand Things, which was highly acclaimed and won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, A Book of Liszts and A Mirror for Monkeys. He has published two volumes of re-imagined Greek myths, Arcadian Nights and Arcadian Days. His critique of Beckett's plays, Beckett the Playwright, written in collaboration with John Fletcher, has also been reissued by Routledge. John Spurling has reviewed for a range of newspapers, magazines and BBC radio and he was for twelve years the art critic of The New Statesman.

Part 1: Patterns of Mind 1. Greene and Brown 2. Berkhamsted and Liberia 3. Women and Men 4. Big Terms 5. The Lost Dimension Part 2: Catholic Novels 1. The Border with Hell 2. Farewell to England 3. Scobie's Burden 4. God's Machinery Part 3: Comedy and Politics 1. Making for La Mancha 2. The Chromium World 3. Banana Politics Part 4: The Man Within 1. Greeneland 2. Berkhamsted Revisited 3. Greene and Others.