For his fans Graham Greene was not just a novelist, he was a literary prophet who foretold the currents of 20th Century history.

Much of that perception rests on The Quiet American (1955), Greene's middle-period novel set at the height of the French Vietnam War. The book has been read as forewarning that the US's attempt to prevent the reunification of Vietnam under Communist rule would ' like the title character of the book ' come to a sticky end.

Temperamentally restless and fond of conflict, Greene served as a foreign correspondent for four winters in Vietnam during the 1946-1954 war, reporting for The Sunday Times and Le Figaro. He saw up close France's agonies of wounded pride and moral compromise as it struggled in an inglorious colonial war against an elusive enemy, the Viet Minh. As related in his autobiography Ways of Escape (1980) Greene had good access to the highest levels of the French command and to Viet Minh agents, and was later to interview Ho Chi Minh.