When Jeremy Lewis started work on Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family (Cape, £25), he found himself venturing into unknown territory:

'Four years ago a member of the Greene family invited me out to lunch and asked me if I’d be interested in writing a book about his family. Like many other people, I’d read many or most of Graham Greene’s books, but I couldn’t claim to be an expert; I remembered his brother, Hugh Carleton Greene, as a controversial and innovative Director-General of the BBC back in the 1960s, and Mary Whitehouse’s bete noire; I had dim memories of a Greene called Felix who had written rhapsodic accounts of life in Communist China under Chairman Mao, and over the years I must have drunk my fill of Greene King beer: but that was as far as it went.

I happily agreed to go ahead, but I had two areas of anxiety: I had no desire to write a family history, starting in the eighteenth century and plodding dutifully forward, since that would be even more boring to write than to read; and I worried that all the other members of the Greene family would prove to be such dull dogs that I would end up writing yet another biography of Graham Greene, with Hugh as his lieutenant and all the other Greenes in spear-carrying roles. As it turned out, neither fear was justified.
 Graham Greene’s father was the Headmaster of Berkhamsted School, in Hertfordshire, and he had six children; his younger brother, Eppy, came to live in Berkhamsted after making a fortune as a coffee merchant in Brazil, and he had six children; and rather than write a boring family history, I decided to concentrate on these twelve children, all of whom grew in the same small Hertfordshire town. To my amazement, and relief, eight of the twelve siblings and first cousins led exceptionally interesting, varied and well-documented lives.

 
 The ‘School House’ Greenes included Raymond, an Everest mountaineer who went on to become a distinguished medical man who later diagnosed Guy the Gorilla’s thyroid problems; Hugh, who started his career as the Daily Telegraph’s Berlin correspondent throughout the 1930s, covering the Night of the Long Knives and Kristallnacht before being expelled in May 1939; Elisabeth, who joined MI6 in 1938, enlisted her brother Graham and Malcolm Muggeridge into the service, spent the war doing top secret work in Middle East, and for a time included Kim Philby among her family’s friends; and Herbert, the black sheep of the family, a drunkard, fantasist and remittance man, who spied ineffectually for the Japanese, wrote a book about his experiences as a secret agent during the Spanish Civil War, and led a nationwide protest when brother Hugh moved the nine o’clock news to ten.
 The wealthier ‘Hall’ Greenes also made their marks. Ben, the oldest boy, left Oxford to do relief work in Central Europe and Russia after World War I, and was active on the left wing of the Labour Party in the 1930s. He was sent out to do relief work among the Jews of Germany after Kristallnacht in November 1938, but on his return he founded a far-right political party to campaign against war with Germany; he was interned in May 1940 at the same time as Oswald Mosley, after being stitched up by an MI5 agent provocateur. His brother Felix was a pioneer radio journalist who made his name by interviewing out-of-work miners and shipyard workers during the Depression: while still in his twenties he was sent out to New York to be the BBC’s first North Amercan correspondent, and promptly signed up Alastair Cooke. A pacifist, like Ben, he resigned when war broke out, and spent the next six years praying in the Californian desert. His feisty sister Barbara took a dim view of his passion for Communist China: back in the 1930s she had walked through Liberia with Cousin Graham, and written an extremely funny book about it; she was trapped in Germany when war broke out before marrying a diplomat connected with the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.

 All in all the Greenes turned out to be a rum and entertaining crew, and my book proved more varied and better balanced than I’d feared when I started out. I miss the Greenes no end, and envy them their amazing self-confidence and enterprise. They seem like figures from a vanished world'

Jeremy Lewis