Green later explained his reasons for using this technique: "I wanted to make that book as taut and spare as possible, to fit the proletarian life I was leading.

Due to fog, however, the train is much delayed and the group takes rooms in the adjacent large railway hotel.

In the absence of their employers the Tennants, the servants enact their own battles and conflict amid rumours about the war in Europe.

In an interview published in The Paris Review in 1958 Terry Southern asked Green about his inspiration for Loving.

The reply was: 'Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.'

Charley calls on Rose's father, Mr Grant, who encourages him to make acquaintance with a young widow.

He discovers that Nancy is the illegitimate daughter of Mr Grant, who sent Charley to her thinking he might console her for the death of her husband, an RAF pilot killed in action.

The rest of the novel describes the complex and troubled relation between Charley and Nancy, as it unfolds against the background of a war-torn Britain.

'"[8] Green was always more popular among fellow authors than with the general public; none of his books sold more than 10,000 copies,[14] although he was more widely read in the 1940s, when Loving appeared briefly on US best-seller lists.

[10] He was admired in his lifetime by W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Eudora Welty, Anthony Burgess, Evelyn Waugh (who knew him well), and Rebecca West.

The last-named said of him, "He was a truly original writer, his prose was fresh minted, he drove his bloodless scalpel inches deeper into the brain and heart, none of it had been said before.

In 1993 Surviving, a collection of previously unpublished works, edited by his grandson Matthew Yorke, was published by Viking Press.

Many contemporary authors have cited him as an influence, including John Updike,[16] writing, "His novels made more of a stylistic impact upon me than those of any writer living or dead" in an introduction to an edition (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics USA, 1993) of three of Green's novels (Living, Loving and Party Going).

The novelist Sebastian Faulks, who also wrote an introduction to an edition (Vintage Classics UK, 2005) of these three novels, calls Green "unique" and says: "No fiction has ever thrilled me as the great moments in Living and Loving".

[10] In his essay The Genesis of Secrecy Frank Kermode discussed Green's novel Party Going and suggested that behind its realistic surface the book hides a complex network of mythical allusions.

Edwin Frank, editor of the New York Review of Books, said Green was "one of the 20th century's great unpeggable originals, each of whose novels (each of whose sentences, you could even say) takes off for new and unexpected places".