I tried not to look at Micky much, so he’d know straightaway he wasn’t the point at issue. But a quick glance told me he was also in his forties, and as thin as a very thin stick. He wore leather back...
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 realise it must be strange for you, being here in England. I realise that we must strike you as a nation of hicks, who only got hot and cold running water the day before you flew in, but even so, I...
Even so, it was a goodish yarn, with plenty of derring-do, and I added some derring-didn’ t-really-but-it-sounds-good, just to keep up her glowing opinion of me.
Allez-vous au plus vite - crac ! Oh, désolé, laissez-moi vous mettre une attelle, monsieur.
Well, that obviously wasn’t good enough. Not by a long shot. Saying period at the end of something doesn’t make it incontrovertible.
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.
Love is a word. A sound. Its association with a particular feeling is arbitrary, unmeasurable, and ultimately meaningless
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...
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 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...
He clambered out of the car, eager to show how quickly he could clamber out of cars, and followed at my shoulder as I strode over to the house.
Carl waited while I knocked, and when the door opened I came within an ace of slipping a couple of pound coins into his gloved hand and asking him to book me a table at L’Epicure. Luckily, he stopped...
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...
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,...
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...
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.
[...] 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...