The Man Within by Graham Greene

Graham Greene’s storytelling, fusing suspense with concise insights into his characters’ inner fears and desires, has always compelled me. Not so many people know that he wrote a historical novel set in the (ostensibly) rollicking world of Sussex smugglers.

Greene's first published novel, actually dating from the late 1920s, is full of intense emotion and suppressed eroticism, against the background of smuggling in Sussex during the Regency period, and a desperate, needy relationship between a man and a woman who are both cast out (or cast themselves out) from their social milieus. The protagonist is a young man named only as Andrews who is wracked with guilt after turning informer to the authorities, threatening to betray the charismatic gang leader Carlyon. Will Andrews follow through with his evidence in court? Betraying Greene’s youth, there is some over-analysis of characters' motivations. But we also have some beautiful descriptions of landscapes and light (usually absent from later Greene) and a structure of considerable suspense. The book has a very exciting filmic opening, setting the scene for an adventure which doesn’t quite ensue in the expected form.

The Sea Child by Linda Wilgus

A gripping and clever adventure set amongst Cornish smugglers, not amazingly original but very well-written. Isabel, a young widow, returns to Helford in Cornwall which is an area that has vague significance for her, because there is a belief amongst the people of the village and coastline that she mysteriously appeared from the sea as a small child. She was then taken to other side of the country by adoptive parents, and got married to a midshipman who was killed at Trafalgar leaving her poorly provided for as the story, set in 1808, begins. Gradually the author shows a relationship developing between a smuggler Captain, Jack Carlyon and Isabel, despite the blandishments of those of her own class, eg an exciseman named Lt. Sowerby. But it turns out that he believes in hanging before trial, whilst Carlyon is clever, funny and gentlemanly, and also, as it turns out, very much from her own class too. Wilgus organises incident, fear, class consciousness, minor characters, landscapes and many more ingredients superbly well, so as to provide an extremely compelling read. One is inevitably reminded of Daphne du Maurier (a location in this book is actually called Frenchman's Creek) by the period and the detailed Cornish topography, although a more obscure homage is that to Graham Greene, in that the name Carlyon is borrowed from The Man Within. Also from that book is borrowed one plot element, the concept of a single woman providing sanctuary to a man on the run. Wilgus’ insight into her characters' minds - for example the bleakness of Isabel's widowhood after a 3-year marriage during which she and her husband spent only a few weeks together - is also worthy of Greene. I particularly appreciated the thought that losing a loved one at sea inevitably alters one's attitude to the water because it forms their only grave. A fine book and remarkably successful for a debut.

Visiting the village today it does not seem dramatically different to anywhere else. Yes, it is pretty, but it is also very busy. The A40 is the High Street, and always full of traffic. There are cottages, offices, one last furniture factory, small shops and three pubs.

The mansion may, as would always have been the case, keep itself rather aloof from the village - when I last visited the house was closed for filming.

But much of the village’s vigorous marketing to the tourist trade focuses on the ‘Hellfire Caves’ a Dashwood-owned venture whereby tunnels under the hill probably created to mine road stone are now interpreted, as they have been since the 1940s, as a Gothic horror attraction, slightly prurient, but definitely popular.

But it is in the pubs that we find clues that this is a preserved village.

The three pubs in the village today, coming from the High Wycombe direction, are the George and Dragon, the Plough and the Swan and the experience of visiting them in that order is rather like going back in time.

The George and Dragon, an obvious coaching inn, grand, double fronted and probably the tallest building in the High Street, is well-used and busy. There is a wide range of drinks available, a restaurant offers good value meals all week, and it also a hotel with bedrooms available. It front view is Georgian, but its rear as Tudor.

Slightly further on, and opposite, is The Plough, whose opening hours are more limited. Going in you walk along a stone-flagged passage and then through a long drinking area before reaching the secluded bar at the back of the building. The atmosphere is rather that of a German bierkeller as there is little daylight: I could see myself spending an enjoyable winter’s day there. However a garden is available, upstairs due to the steep hillside on that side of the high street, and from there we find an interesting view of the village’s roofscape. No food is served beyond a wide choice of crisps, some in unusual flavours.

And so to The Swan. Near the gates to West Wycombe Park, the home of the Dashwood family, stands a building almost as historic as that great mansion. Like the mansion, this inn, white painted with blue shutters, also dates largely from the 18^th century. Inside are two characterful low-beamed rooms filled with a miscellany of furniture, none more recent than the 1960s. The serving bars are small, and there are no beer pumps. Your pint of beer (for which you must pay cash) will be drawn from barrels stillaged up behind the bar by mine host Miss Christine Barry, a landlady almost as ageless as her premises. There is a door marked ‘dining room’ but Miss Barry no longer provides meals for the general public. There will be no music playing, but the bar television may be on, for this is emphatically a personal home. The Swan is locally listed as an asset of community value, and is Buckinghamshire’s only pub in the Campaign for Real Ale National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors.

How often do you find a country pub that can cope without doing food? As rare as hen’s teeth, I’d say. The economic explanation must lie somewhere in favourable treatment by a benevolent landlord. And long may the National Trust remain in this spirit, I say, raising a pint of gravity-dispensed Rebellion ale. The experience of buying beer that is not raised from a cellar via a Victorian beer engine, but is poured from a barrel you can see yourself, opens up the experience of the ale house from the 18th century, and well earlier. It is truly ‘Living History with a Pint.’

An earlier version of this piece appeared in Chiltern magazine, Autumn 2025.

I saw Barry Lyndon for the first time in 1976. One day during that very hot summer, my father (an English professor who had possibly even read the source novel) took my mother, my sisters and I to sit through the film. It was an overwhelming experience and I remember little of my teenage reactions except for two conclusions – 1, it was extraordinarily beautiful and 2, it was more Victorian than 18^th century (I think I had already read Tom Jones). Since that day I have of course seen the film many times in cinemas and on the television screen. It is for me, the historical film.

I am assuming that readers of this article have seen Barry Lyndon and know its plot. On release in 1975, it was a commercial failure in the USA but better-received in the rest of the world; its popularity and critical reputation have climbed immensely since then. Hundreds of internet pages have been written about it, and two books.[i][ii]

The origins of Barry Lyndon lie in Stanley Kubrick’s planned film of the life of Napoleon. However by the early 70s, the director, always conscious of commercial realities despite his unremitting focus on making the films he wanted to make, was prevailed upon to shelve the project. A series of biographical epics were failing epically at the box office – not just Waterloo in which Rod Steiger played Napoleon, but also Cromwell and Nicholas and Alexandra[iii]. But Warners Brothers did back Kubrick to make a less expensive historical film which would use some of the research for the Napoleon project. He turned to a little-known work by one of his favourite novelists, a writer whose wry and rather impersonal commentaries on the human condition, as reflected in historical events, clearly chimed with Kubrick’s own outlook. Barry Lyndon, by William Makepeace Thackeray, was first published in 1844[iv]. Thackeray’s inspiration was the history of the Irish soldier Andrew Robinson Stoney (1747-1810) who gained great wealth by marriage to Mary Eleanor Bowes, widow of the Earl of Strathmore. Stoney tricked Bowes into marrying him via a conspiracy involving a faked duel. On marriage he incorporated his wife’s name into his own. He starved and beat his wife for years in the attempt to acquire her fortune, but was ultimately unsuccessful and died in prison.

The resemblances between this historical biography and the novel/film are obvious – Redmond Barry changes his name to Barry Lyndon on marriage to the widowed Honoria, Lady Lyndon, flies very high in wealthy society, but then loses everything. The book’s writing style has a knowing dryness wherein we can easily spot how the author teases the vanity of his leading man, through whose egotistical eyes the story is told. Thackeray was married to an Irish woman and was obviously fascinated by the melancholic fluctuations, as he saw it, of the Irish psyche. Much of the book concerns itself with class-conscious humour which has dated. The name of Barry’s nemesis, his stepson Lord Bullingdon, may have been inspired by the Bullingdon Club, a clique of wealthy Oxford University students.

In adapting the book, Kubrick removed some characters and enlarges others and – as any Hollywood adaptor of a Victorian novel would do – improved the organization of the story, whilst also adding far more emotional heft. The climactic duel between Barry and his stepson was purely Kubrick’s conception and greatly improves on the original, in which Bullingdon only manages to give his stepfather a thrashing.

Another story about a selfish protagonist who negotiates war and poverty, marries for money but then sees the marriage collapse after the death of a child in a riding accident is Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The film of the book was, in visual terms alone, outstandingly successful. These visuals are not enough for many people, Kubrick himself among them. As he commented (quoted by Strelow): ‘It’s a really terrible movie.’ Thirty five years on, did the director approach Barry Lyndon in a competitive spirit? A fascinating speculation.

Warner Bros insisted that a bankable leading man played the main character. The rather blandly handsome Ryan O’Neal may not have been Kubrick’s first choice, but he turns in a fine performance, conveying more grief and self-doubt than is ever suggested by the bumptious voice of Thackeray’s narration. The script was originally closer to the book, with narration in the first person, and with scenes in Dublin which were never filmed. These changes were made during production. No shooting script was used: everything was organized in the director’s own head.

Kubrick originally planned to film in a converted aircraft hanger in Radlett, near his Hertfordshire home. However the powerful film industry unions expressed their displeasure at any production outside of a purpose-built film studio. Because the idea of building his own studio was solely intended to maintain control of his unit, Kubrick then made a rapid U-turn and decided to film entirely in the Republic of Ireland. This could readily be justified in terms of the number of historical settings available. Other films set in similar periods had recently used Irish locations: Peter Coe’s Lock up Your Daughters (1969) in which Kildare Town stands in for 18^th century London, James Clavell’s Where’s Jack (1969) and John Huston’s Sinful Davy (1969).

Aided by expert production designer Ken Adam, a roster of locations were chosen. Initially based in Waterford, from summer 1973 the cast and crew, about 160 people, roved around the countryside, castles and demesnes. Many Irish actors and technicians were employed: some 250 men from the Irish army were recruited as soldier extras, kitted out in costumes sent over from Radlett.

The battle scene - Kubrick acts as his own camera operator behind Ryan O’Neal, while Godfey Quigley takes a smoke break. I believe the car is an adapted Volkswagen 181 Trekker.

At this time the Irish Troubles were at their height, affecting both North and South. In January 1974 a day’s filming in Dublin’s Phoenix Park had to be cancelled due to IRA bomb threats in the city. In February 1974 all production in Ireland was abruptly closed down. It has been widely reported that this was due to a bomb threat, but the truth remains murky. Maria Pramaggiore comments that it may have been a hoax threat made by an extra who had been fired. Following a hurried move, filming continued on English locations for the scenes corresponding to the second part of the story.

This free-wheeling method of production does reveal itself in little mistakes. There is an obvious costume continuity error in the scenes where Barry has temporarily promoted himself from private to lieutenant. When referring to the death of Lady Lyndon’s first husband the novel states that it happened ‘in the Kingdom of Ireland’, but the film changes that to ‘the Kingdom of Belgium’, Kubrick being unaware that this country did not exist in the eighteenth century. One character, Lord Wendover, is introduced with the first name of ‘Gustavus Adolphus’, but later addressed as ‘Neville’. Towards the end, mention is made of the Irish-sounding ‘Doolan’s Farm’, but whilst in the book this part of the narrative happens in Ireland, in the film we see recognizable English locations.

Still, the experience of watching the film is one I always find immensely compelling. We begin with a duel scene filmed in crepuscular light against a mountainous background[v]; as soon as we start to wonder who is fighting who, the narrator (Michael Hordern) explains that we are witnessing the death of Redmond Barry’s father. The first actor seen in close up is Marie Kean as the widowed Mrs Barry, as she walks through the garden of her Irish cottage on the arm of a would-be suitor, who never appears again. But the first dialogue is the word ‘Killarney’ spoken by Gay Hamilton as Nora Quin at the end of card game she and Redmond have been playing in a shell-lined room beyond whose window rain is falling. The game leads to flirtation, but then flirtation inevitably leads to disappointment, as Nora is stolen away from Redmond by the comically abrasive English officer, Captain Quinn (Leonard Rossiter.)

Although the film has a reputation for slowness, it does cover a period of some 30 years as Barry moves from minor Irish gentry to soldiering to gambling and then to great wealth as the husband of a Countess: time jumps are handled with some economy. The narration, dryly written in the third person but closely adapted from Thackeray, streamlines the transitions between scenes. Every shot is beautifully set up. Often the zoom lens works dynamically, as a scene starts on a detail and then widens out to show an artfully-arranged composition. For many interior shots, the backgrounds are soft, and indeed at times only the eyes of the actors remain in focus. This short depth of field was a consequence of the wide camera aperture that Kubrick required, due to his insistence that only (or mainly) candles should be used for lighting – an approach to authenticity which, like the frequent zooming, counterintuitively draws attention to the very fact that we are watching a film.

As people are static and glorious music plays, whilst the mellifluous narration moves the story along, the effect is rather like being in an art gallery that tells a story. It is far from a silent film, however. Much dialogue is adapted from Thackeray, but there are also newly-written scenes. Some of these are excellent: late in the film there is a dialogue between Mrs Barry and the chaplain Reverend Runt (Murray Melvin) which is a superb example of how two people’s long-tried civility can dissolve, when circumstances change.

The film’s tone resembles, ultimately, that of late Victorian melodrama, where morality triumphs and women are idealized. In Barry Lyndon only Barry’s mother is a vivid character – the other women are types. The German girl Lischen is used by Thackeray in a farcical mistaken identity scene which is probably the funniest part of the book, livelier than the film’s ponderous little romance between her (Diana Koerner) and Barry. Kubrick’s camera idolizes the beauty of Marisa Berenson, playing Honoria. Although she does good work with her eyes, her vocal variety is limited. Hence the script gives her little to say, and much of that dialogue is stiff. For example she always calls her first son ‘Lord Bullingdon’ even within the family. Honoria is also a flat character in the book, where her marriage to Redmond takes place only 70 pages from the end. Whilst the film is better structured, she remains a distant ideal, quite different from the vibrant women in films based on eighteenth century originals, such as Tom Jones (1963.)

The death Barry’s son Brian is glossed over by Thackeray (he finds himself here with an incident at odds with his authorial tone) but in the film there is a poignant, arguably mawkish, deathbed scene and funeral, punishing the protagonist even more severely than Scarlet O’Hara was punished by the death of Bonnie Blue. Strelow calls this, with justification, ‘the most openly emotional sequence in any Kubrick film’. An eighteenth century viewer might recognize the look of Barry Lyndon – Hogarth, Gainsborough and others – but be perplexed by its earnest moral tone. Considering how out of key this tone is with the 1970s, it is amazing that this film was funded by a Hollywood studio. Beauty overcomes a lot. This beauty, the notion that the past was more picturesque, as well as more eventful, is what draws a lot of us to creating historical fiction. When writing, I often find myself inserting little homages to Barry Lyndon.

The combination of a fire rescue scene with a military reward may be familiar to anyone who has read A Cruel Corpse

Despite the authenticity of the costumes and settings, the film’s outlook is quite unlike Thackeray or indeed the 18^th century but is something much closer to the sensibility which underlay the films of the 1920s and 1930s, the films which Kubrick first admired as a boy. It is, in every way, a world of its own. Since its release it has inspired a whole mythology – in 2017 came a short film about the making of Barry Lyndon, David O’Reilly’s romantic comedy Kubrick by Candlelight, and this year has seen the publication of a novella about the filming, Kieran Ginty’s thriller Saving Ryan.

Let the final word with rest with Kubrick himself. In a magazine interview published in 1972, when he would have been planning Barry Lyndon, he laid down a challenge, one which applies to us novelists too: ‘I don’t think anyone has ever successfully solved the problem of dealing in an interesting way with the historical information that has to be conveyed, and at the same time getting a sense of reality about the daily life of the characters.’ (quoted by Strelow).

Having identified this problem, Kubrick then made a film which – despite the few shortcomings I mention above – overcomes it in magnificent style.

A shorter version of this article was published in the May 2026 edition of Historical Novels Review.

[i] Pramaggiore, Maria, Making Time in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, London, Bloomsbury, 2015.

[ii] Strelow, John, The Big Movie: A Guide to Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, independently published, 2023.

[iii] Two of these three are quite interesting, but rampant inaccuracy deprives Cromwell of any merit.

[iv] Thackeray, W.M., Sanders, Andrew (Introduction), Barry Lyndon, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

[v] John Strelow proves that the composition of this shot was modelled closely on one in Hell’s Angels (1930).

My novel A Cruel Corpse is the first of a trilogy of historical crime novels set in the 18th century. It introduces the investigators Grace Hayden and Jasper Greatheed.

Carlisle, northern England in 1747; a rebellion has been put down, but trouble persists for two soldiers in the government army: Jasper Greatheed is a man with a secret – as a ‘molly’ he could be hanged for sodomy; his friend is also living a lie – Private Hayden Gray is in fact a woman, Grace Hayden. Their secrets unsuspected until now, they are part of the city garrison; when a vicious sergeant is murdered, Hayden comes under sharp suspicion, for her only alibi will wreck her masquerade, and if she is exposed, as her ‘dresser’ Jasper will also soon be unmasked. They set out to find the sergeant’s real murderer before time runs out – after all, the officer who is leading the official investigation has reason to hate Hayden.

You can buy it here A Cruel Corpse

Many years earlier, I had honed my skills in historical research and communication, with the first book I published - a guide to acoustic sound reproduction machines from the 1870s to the 1950s that played either cylinders or discs, and which used no electricity but relied purely on the amplification power of the horn.

You can buy it here

Old Gramophones and Other Talking Machines

My book reviews and other articles about historical novels and film can be found in the Historical Novels Review, published by the Historical Novel Society.

To find out more about the Society, go to Historical Novel Society

I write about the byways of history in the beautiful region where I live in Chiltern, the magazine of the Chiltern Society.

Chiltern Society

The world of female soldiers and sailors was only fairly recently proven to have been factual, rather than the stuff of legendary figures such as ‘Sweet Polly Oliver’ from the traditional song. I don’t think I really took on board the dramatic and literary possibilities until about 10 years ago when a visit to a museum introduced me to Hannah Snell (1723 – 1792) who served both in Guise’s Regiment or Sixth Foot (later the Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers) and the Royal Marines. I then discovered that she was not unique because there many more women who dressed and lived as men in the eighteenth century – a period when they were helped by the fact that men were all clean-shaven and tended to wear their hair long, or use wigs.

I conceived a character named Hayden Gray, one of a garrison of soldiers cooped up inside a castle in the aftermath of a war. A murder has taken place and the dead man, Sergeant Beatty, was no friend of Hayden. In order to divert suspicion from herself, and so safeguard her secret, she has to turn detective.

Initially I intended to merely write a short story. It was called Garrison Duty and shows Hayden, assisted by her friend Jasper, changing out of her military uniform and descending from the castle into the city below, and in that guise winning the trust of a tavern girl and so finding out the real killer. I wrote the story in the first person. It is obvious that the main character is a soldier, albeit one with a secret, but it is not until the very end of the tale that we find out the nature of the secret – that she is a woman. This story was submitted to a crime story competition judged by the prolific thriller writer Howard Linskey. He was very enthusiastic about the inventiveness of the concept, and even said he could see it succeeding as a novel.

I was excited by his enthusiasm and set to work on a novel about Hayden Gray and Jasper Greatheed, soldiers with secrets. I thought of a lot of further incident, other murders, a court case, entrapment, and so on, so as to make a full length novel in the historical crime genre.

I was determined to start on page one with Hayden on duty in the army and with the murder victim already dead, so that the man killed should continue to present a danger even from his grave. All this means that a lot of backstory has to be in place early on.

Perhaps echoing the questions we might ask of Hannah Snell or any of her contemporaries, why does Hayden choose to masquerade as a soldier? Who is helping her maintain her secret in a crowded barrack? And in terms of plot logic, what did Hayden do to earn the dislike of the dead man and his friend, the official investigator, the Provost Marshal?

I found an answer to the last question in the life of Hannah as related in her 1750 biography The Female Soldier (included in the 1997 biography of Hannah by Matthew Stephens.) We are told that she was charged with ‘neglect of duty’ by a corrupt sergeant because she prevented him from raping a local woman, and that she was punished by flogging. I borrowed the same incident and made the corrupt sergeant the initial murder victim – the Cruel Corpse of my title. However I dispensed with the flogging, as I did not think readers would believe that my heroine could remove her shirt and yet conceal her breasts, as alleged in The Female Soldier. I replaced the flogging with a demotion, shown in flashback, from corporal to private.

Hayden’s reason to go into the army was resolved as a matter of debt, relating to the fact that she had earlier fallen foul of the always-fine distinction between acting and prostitution. Her helper in the army I decided would be the man who had recruited her in the first place. Jasper, I decided, would be a bandsman orderly who has the keeping of the medical stores, thus having an opportunity to safely hold Hayden’s female clothes, and indeed the supplies she needs to deal with menstruation. I felt he should be a man accustomed to keeping secrets, and that she should be relaxed with him. Thus it became obvious that he should be a gay man, an ex-theatre colleague. This increases his jeopardy because of his risk of punishment for the crime of sodomy

Having the backstory in mind, successfully getting it into the book was very difficult. This caused a lot of rewriting. Initially the book was all written in the first person, from Hayden’s point of view. This theoretically might have enabled a structure like the short story with the same ongoing secret. But it soon became clear that if the reveal was kept secret for the length of a novel, the reader would mistrust everything else she or he had read up that point. Also I found that confining myself only to what one person could experience was an unnecessary constraint on plotting. So the whole book was re-written into the third person, and many more characters were given scenes from their points of view.

Eventually it dawned on me that I could use my secondary main character, Jasper, and his medical role, to introduce the body before I actually introduce Hayden. I also rewrote several scenes from her point of view to his, thus providing more about how she appears. This also helped me to overcome the backstory problems.

I also took from the Hannah Snell biography the city and castle of Carlisle, an isolated setting and one which, as my story starts, is still recovering from having been the only English city occupied by Jacobites. The postwar setting, of garrison soldiers suddenly at peace but falling out amongst themselves, was rather inspired by James Kennaway’s Tunes of Glory, one of my favourite books and films; but in my case the war that has finished is not World War 2 but the 1745 Jacobite rebellion.

I think the eventual outcome is suspenseful, vivid and reasonably fair to the history, whilst being a crime novel first and foremost, not a discussion of transvestism, nor indeed a valorisation of female endeavour in the world of men. If A Cruel Corpse does one thing, I hope it will appeal as much to the slim number of male readers of historical fiction as to the female readers. Writers whom I like and respect, Kate Griffin and Howard Linskey have both been kind enough to compare my book with Bernard Cornwell’s superb body of work, and I have also had endorsements from Eleanor Swift-Hook, a fine writer of historical crime in a military setting, and from A.J. West, a novelist who has conscientiously researched the 18^th century gay scene.

My book is available at https://tinyurl.com/BenBergonziACruelCorpse

Needless to say, Hayden and Jasper will return.