Elegant and playful, always wise and sometimes profound, Greene's essays - first collected in this form in 1969 - are among his most enduring achievements. Whether lampooning academic silliness (in a mock-earnest deconstruction of Beatrix Potter), worrying about Henry James ("There had always been - let's face it - a suspicion of vulgarity about the Old Master") or championing the then forgotten Ford Madox Ford (who attracted "the kind of enemies a man ought to have" and who had "a half-belief in a posterity which would care for good writing"), he gets to the heart of his subjects with a limpid persuasiveness that's wholly engaging. And his 1947 essay, "The Lost Childhood", explaining why a first reading at 14 of Marjorie Bowen's The Viper of Milan determined the future course of his life, remains one of the 20th-century masterpieces of the form.