The family lived in Berkhamsted, a small, pleasant satellite town of London. As was usual with prosperous people of that period, the children were raised by servants, but they were brought downstairs to play with their mother every day for an hour after tea. An older brother, Raymond, grew up to be an important endocrinologist a younger brother, Hugh, became the director-general of the BBC the youngest child, Elisabeth, went to work for M.I.6, England’s foreign-intelligence operation. His family was comfortable and, by and large, accomplished. Greene was born in 1904, the fourth of six children. It showed, he said, “a boy, bound and gagged, dangling at the end of a rope inside a well with water rising above his waist.” Around that time, Greene taught himself to read, and he always remembered the cover illustration of the first book to which he gained admission. If that doesn’t suffice to set the tone for the rather lurid events of Greene’s life, one need only turn the page, to find him, at five or so, watching a man run into a local almshouse to slit his own throat. (It included George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Elizabeth Bowen.) The dog, Graham’s sister’s pug, had just been run over, and the nanny couldn’t think of how to get the carcass home other than to stow it in the carriage with the baby. “The first thing I remember is sitting in a pram at the top of a hill with a dead dog lying at my feet.” So opens an early chapter of a memoir by Graham Greene, who is viewed by some-including Richard Greene (no relation), the author of a new biography of Graham, “ The Unquiet Englishman” (Norton)-as one of the most important British novelists of his already extraordinary generation.

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