Only adults had nervous breakdowns in those days, so the methods of survival for boys who refused to join the system were animal cunning, internal immigration as the Germans call it, or simply getting...
One more consideration also weighed with Smiley, though in his paper he is too gentlemanly to mention it. A lot of ghosts walked in those post-fall days, and one of them was a fear that, buried somewh...
Odd, he remarked finally. One has no sense of shock. Why is that, Peter? You know me. Why is it?
It’s the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies? Who can smell out the fox without running with him?
It is not fashionable to quote Stalin but he said once, half a million liquidated is a statistic, and one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy.
His secretive nature detested the purpose of all interviews, their oppressive intimacy, their inescapable reality.
Her palm was broad and strong and dry. Its nakedness against his own was like the gift of her entire body.
Germany’s emergence as a self-confident, non-aggressive, democratic power – not to speak of the humanitarian example it has set – is a pill too bitter for many of us Brits to swallow. That is a sadnes...
Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time,...
Essere inumani in difesa della nostra umanità, spietati in difesa della compassione. Essere monotoni in difesa della nostra varietà.
En vandaar dwaalde hij af naar een meningsverschil met Friedrich Schillers hoogdravende theorie dat wat de goden tevergeefs bestreden menselijke domheid was. Daar was Toby het niet mee eens. Dat was v...
But she never quite saw the fighting for votes and the fighting for sales in the same way. Perhaps that was because it cut them down to size, she thought. It was easy when there were a dozen or so tog...
And what am I thinking? I am thinking that a man who cannot speak clearly cannot think clearly.
An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function:
I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly...
You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and d...
I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.
Was from us they learnt the secret of life: that we grow old without growing wise.
Suspicion, experience, perception, common sense—for Maston these were not the organs of fact. Paper was fact, Ministers were fact,
More cruelly: he feared her faith because, as a fully paid-up pessimist, he knew he had none.