We exchanged wry military grins that told each other how much we hated those fly-blown pieces of shit who tied the hands of decent men and called it politics.
To follow somebody, without them knowing that you’re doing it, is not the doddle they make it seem in films. I’ve had some experience of professional following, and a lot more experience of profession...
There weren’t many good things to be said or felt about my situation. Not many at all. But the rule is that after any engagement, won or lost, you replay it in you mind to see how much you can learn....
She kissed me. She kissed me. What I mean is, I was standing there, lips puckered, brain puckered, and she just stepped up and threw her tongue into my mouth. For a moment, I thought maybe she’d tripp...
She just played with it slowly, and then pointed a pair of grey eyes at me. I say a pair. I mean her pair. She didn’t get a pair of someone else’s out from a drawer and point them at me. She pointed h...
Rayner, I estimated, was ten years older than me. Which was fine. Nothing wrong with that. I have good, warm, non-arm-breaking relationships with plenty of people who are ten years older than me. Peop...
Not surprisingly, they frisked me like they were taking a frisking exam. To get into the Royal College of Frisking. Five times, head to toe, mouth, ears, crotch, soles of shoes. They tore most of my c...
Normally, words are sentfrom the brain towards the mouth, and somewhere along the line you take a moment to checkthem, see that they are actually the ones you ordered and that they’re nicely wrapped,...
Later, a very fat woman came in with a trolley and put a plate of something brown and foul-smelling on a table beside me. I couldn’t imagine what I’d ever done to her, but whatever it was, it must hav...
I’ve been in prison, you see. Only three weeks, and only on remand, but when you’ve had to play chess twice a day with a monosyllabic West Ham supporter, who has ‘HATE’ tattooed on one hand, and ‘HATE...
Imagine that you have to break someone's arm.Right or left, doesn't matter. The point is that you have to break it, because if you don't...well, that doesn't matter either. Let's just say bad things w...
I stayed where I was and watched. The man and the corridor. He didn’t make any other noise, and the corridor didn’t do anything that corridors don’t normally do.
I looked at her and sighed. In another world, I thought to myself, it might have worked. In another world, in another universe, in another time, as two quite different people, we really might have bee...
I had to wonder how Ginny could hold her head up under the weight of cosmetics smeared all over her face. Underneath it all, she may have been quite pretty. Or she may have been Dirk Bogarde. I will n...
Americans have never really caught on to the idea of eating sheep. I think they think it's cissy.
The French came to Morocco to build roads, railways, hospitals, schools, fashion sense - all the things that the average Frenchman knows to be indispensable to a modern civilization - and when five o’...
Somewhere a clock ticked. Quite fast. Too fast, it seemed to me, to be counting seconds. But then this was an American building, and maybe Americans had decided that seconds were just too goddamned sl...
Necessity is the mother of self-delusion.
I once met an RAF pilot who told me of what he called a bird strike. This, rather unfairly in my view, made it sound as if it was the bird's fault; as if the little feathered chap had deliberately tri...
[...] and as I walked, I tried to see the funny side. It wasn't easy, and I'm still not sure that I managed it properly, but it's just something I like to do when things aren't going well. Because wha...