In the 1970s and 1980s, Graham Greene adopted the yearly habit of touring Spain and Portugal in the company of his Spanish friend, the priest and university professor Leopoldo Durán. The most outstanding fruit of these trips, almost always in summer, was the inspiration for his major Hispanic novel, Monsignor Quixote (1982), a celebration of friendship above ideological, political, or religious differences, incorporating allusions to Cervantes' famous comic novel within a critical vision of post-Franco Spain. Graham Greene's Journeys in Spain and Portugal: Travels with My Priest reconstructs each of Greene's trips through the Iberian Peninsula between 1976 and 1989, detailing their preparations, itineraries, anecdotes, companions, topics of conversation, and often surprising repercussions. Carlos Villar Flor outlines the trips' biographical importance and fills numerous gaps of documented information on this final phase of Greene's life. His detailed inquiry into Greene's Iberian adventures with Durán also helps us better to understand the genesis and resonances of Monsignor Quixote, which over time became Greene's favourite of his own novels, and the subsequent television adaptation. The book also addresses incidents and aspects that, for one reason or another, never emerged in Durán's own account of their travels together, Graham Greene: Friend and Brother (1994). These include the possible motivations for Greene's first visit to Spain, related to his role as an informant for MI6; the mysterious visits to an old English lady located in Sintra; the writer's attempts in the early 1980s to establish links with Spanish socialists; or the fascinating story of a Spanish nobleman's suspicious proposal to create a Greene Foundation. Ultimately, Greene's trips to Spain and Portugal appear as more layered and intriguing than Durán's account suggests, whilst Durán himself emerges aptly as a complex and quixotic figure--as much the protagonist of this book as Greene.

This discussion of Graham Greene's faith uses Monsignor Quixote, one of Greene's later novels, as a departure point to discuss the author's faith in both secular and divine terms. The scholars involved in this project wanted to explore innocence and experience, peace and war, love and hate in Greene's richly human literary tapestry. Greene's Christianity (or lack of it) is explored, as are his major novels and their often bleak and tatty settings. The novels discusses include Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, The Honorary Consul, Dr Fischer of Geneva and, of course, Monsignor Quixote. Among the international scholars included in this collection are Mark Bosco, SJ, Debanjan Chakrabarti, Peter Christensen, Thomas Dobozy, Fr.Leopoldo Duran, Berta Cano Echevarra, Cedric Watts, B.L.Thomson and Thomas Hill. Thomas Hill is author of Graham Greene's Wanderers and senior professor at Sophia University's Department of Literature.

A record of the last years of Graham Greene's life, in which he agonized over his faith. Many of the debates recorded in Monsignor Quixote were actually conducted with the author, Fr Duran. For 27 years, he was probably the closest friend of the novelist.

A wildly humorous account of the author's travels across Paraguay–South America's darkly fabled, little-known “island surrounded by land.” Rarely visited by tourists and barely touched by global village sprawl, Paraguay remains a mystery to outsiders. Think of this small nation and your mind is likely to jump to Nazis, dictators, and soccer. Now, John Gimlette’s eye-opening book–equal parts travelogue, history, and unorthodox travel guide–breaches the boundaries of this isolated land,” and illuminates a little-understood place and its people. It is a wonderfully animated telling of Paraguay's story: of cannibals, Jesuits, and sixteenth-century Anabaptists; of Victorian Australian socialists and talented smugglers; of dictators and their mad mistresses; bloody wars and Utopian settlements; and of lives transplanted from Japan, Britain, Poland, Russia, Germany, Ireland, Korea, and the United States. The author travels from the insular cities and towns of the east, along ghostly trails through the countryside, to reach the Gran Chaco of the west: the “green hell” covering almost two-thirds of the country, where 4 percent of the population coexists–more or very-much-less peacefully–with a vast array of exotic wildlife that includes jaguars, prehistoric lungfish, and their more recently evolved distant cousins, the great fighting river fish. Gimlette visits with Mennonites and the indigenas, arms dealers and real-estate tycoons, shopkeepers, government bureaucrats and, of course, Nazis. Filled with bizarre incident, fascinating anecdote, and richly evocative detail, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a brilliant description of a country of eccentricity and contradiction, of beguilingly individualistic men and women, and of unexpected and extraordinary beauty. It is a vivid, often riotous, always fascinating, journey.