Graham Greene began his last and posthumously published dream diary, A World of my Own, with these words; and he chooses the word ‘travel’ to characterize the entirely private world of dreams. In his waking life, as in his subconscious and creative lives, travel exercised a controlling influence. He greatly admired the novels of Trollope; but Greene could never have become the kind of novelist he was, if he had lived Trollope's life. The increase in the possibility of travel, and its practice, may yet turn out to be among the most culturally significant changes within the twentieth century, which in the twenty-first may again be superseded by the exchange of information on computerized highways. But that inability to be still in one's own room to which Pascal ascribed half the ills of mankind gives to Greene's life and work a restless anxiety, seen in its best light as an ongoing quest, and in its more doubtful form as a solitary man's need to remain in the limelight. (As a novelist committed to a life of action, he has much in common with his French contemporary, André Malraux.) The price paid by the traveller is an absence of peace, whether in mind or body, and a longing for home which can never be satisfied except for a brief reprieve. The word ‘peace’ recurs often in Greene's fiction and never more tellingly or ambivalently than in The Heart of the Matter. ‘He [Scobie] dreamed of peace by day and night. Once in sleep it appeared to him as the great glowing shoulder of the moon heaving across his window like an iceberg, Arctic and destructive in the moment before the world was struck … Peace seemed to him the most beautiful word in the language’ (HM 60). To the writer who described his theme as rootlessness, and who only found home where he happened to be, peace remained elusive. Even writing becomes a ‘form of action’.