Graham Greene writes: ‘An autobiography is only “a sort of life” – it may contain fewer errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely. If one cannot close a book of memories on the deathbed, a conclusion must be arbitrary, and I have preferred to finish this essay with the years of failure which followed the acceptance of my first novel… In another sense too a book like this can only be “a sort of life”, for in the course of sixty-six years I have spent almost as much time with imaginary characters as with real men and women.