LAST SATURDAY, Nottingham’s splendid St Barnabas Cathedral hosted a study day on Graham Greene as part of its 175th anniversary celebrations.

Liberia, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Vietnam: Greene’s novels are marked by their sense of place. But Nottingham, damp and sooty but a place of “sudden contrasts”, also satisfied his appetite for the seedily exotic. Greene arrived here in November 1925, and stayed with his dog, Paddy, in All Saints Terrace for four months while working as a subeditor for the local newspaper.

It was a decisive moment in his life and fiction, as James Moran, a regular on our books pages who attended the study day, told us. Shortly after arriving, as Greene described it later, he “slipped a note into a collection box in the cathedral, asking for instruction because my fiancée was Catholic. I wanted to understand what she believed in, I wanted a better grasp of the nature of her faith. I had no thought of becoming a convert myself.”