So it turns out that Graham Greene’s Mexico books were driven by something other than wanderlust and his desire to retroactively endorse the Cristeros and defend his Catholicism against oppression.
New evidence says he was actually forced to flee prosecution for his printed comments about Shirley Temple. (He’d written a review of one of the eight-year-old ingenue’s movies and perceptively noted that some portion of her male audience was attracted to the weird sexualization of a child.) The Temple people sued, and Greene realized he was facing jail time for his review — so he ran away to Mexico, which had no extradition agreement with Britain.
So against the many crimes of Britain’s silly libel laws must now be balanced the fact they produced The Power and the Glory, one of my favorites.
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Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
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