He attended Manchester Grammar School and won a scholarship to study history at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with first-class honours.
[1] Greenberg arrived in the United States in 1939 to attend the graduate school of Harvard University under a Joseph Hodges Choate Memorial Fellowship from Trinity College.
In August 1941, Edward Clark Carter, general secretary to the Pacific Council of the IPR, wrote Lauchlin Currie asking if letters to Owen Lattimore in China could be transmitted so that "they are not read by others before reaching him."
Civil Service Commission security officials wanted Greenberg dismissed upon learning of an alleged involvement with the Communist Party (see Silvermaster file 2C page 18).
Blocked from academic promotion, most likely due to his left-leaning politics, he went on to work in a number of jobs in journalism, public relations, advertising and film criticism in England, Switzerland and France.
He commented that in the City of London most people shared the Marxist analysis of capitalism that he had learned in Cambridge in the 1930s, but that they were, by contrast, quite content with the implicit inequalities.