Berkhamsted's spies, scribes and secrets revealed in Greene family biography

Novelist Graham Greene may be the family's most famous member, but a Berkhamsted dynasty is the subject of a new biography that chronicles their involvement in politics, journalism, literature and international espionage. 

In Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family, Jeremy Lewis charts the lives of the Greenes between the 1920s and 1970s, and provides a snapshot of upper middle class England at the same time. 

The story begins in the early years of the last century, when two brothers, Charles and Edward Greene, settled in Berkhamsted. Charles became the headmaster of Berkhamsted School and the men went on to father 12 children between them, each of whom led remarkable lives.

Graham's siblings included Hugh, who was the Daily Telegraph Berlin correspondent from 1934 to 1939 and later became Director General of the BBC; black sheep Herbert, who tried his hand as a tobacco farmer in Rhodesia, was shipped home from South America and spied for the Japanese; Elizabeth, who worked for MI6 during the war; and Raymond, a mountaineer and medic who took part in the 1933 Everest expedition.

Among his cousins, there was Ben, a pacifist and Labour Party activist who was interned in 1940 at the same time as Oswald Mosley; Felix, a pioneer of radio journalism and apologist for Communist China, who moved to a commune in California with his cousin Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley; and Barbara, who spent the war in Germany and became a writer herself. 

And of course, there was Graham, whose unhappiness at Berkhamsted School has been well-documented. Bullied and suicidal as a boy, he went on to become one of the best known writers of the 20th century, publishing books including Brighton Rock and The Third Man. 

The book is published in hardback next week by Random House and is priced £25.