And another question: is there a cheap and easy way of getting access to the text of "Rumour at nightfall", particularly during a COVID lockdown when reading it in the British Library would be even less convenient than it usually would be?

UPDATE: I can answer my own question: https://archive.org/details/RumourAtNightfall1931GrahamGreen... ; I couldn't find it anywhere the last time I tried!

Since you asked ... do you know anything about Graham Greene's contact with Esperanto and perhaps some other constructed language?

"Stamboul train" has some Esperanto expressions standing in for Hungarian, and "The confidential agent" has a constructed language called Entrenationo, which the Wikipedia article claims is "obviously modelled on Esperanto" but which sounds a look more like Interlingua to me, though there could be other candidates from around that time. It would be nice to know who the Dr Bellows character is based on. (There's almost no resemblance to Dr Zamenhof.)

As someone who has only tried reading The End of the Affair and given up half-way, please excuse my ignorance but what is the source of your fascination with Graham Greene?

Knowing so many people who love his books gives me a bit of FOMO, especially after giving up on that book. Would you recommend a different one to start with?