I’m a European, Peter. If I had a mission – if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable id...
Forgive me. Sometimes an answer can vary with a context, if you follow me
Even his Englishness was a well-kept secret.
An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function:
All right, Pendel had lied to him, if lying was the word. He had told Osnard what he wanted to hear and gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain it for him, including making it up. Some people lied bec...
Who’s an ex-diplomat of all people to complain if the wrapping is prettier than what’s inside?
Affectation of assuming everything was alive and potentially recalcitrant,
Todd and Larry were Quinn’s people. They were clean-limbed and pretty and, for a man of my age, ludicrously youthful.
Think I’ll just buff up the silver,’ he announced, loud enough for her to hear and do something about him if she wanted.
There are moments that are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
The tortured are a class apart. You can imagine – just – where they’ve been, but never what they’ve brought back.
The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
The monstrosity of this, reaching Smiley through a thickening wall of spiritual exhaustion, left him momentarily speechless.
Smiley was not opposed to social distinctions but he liked to make his own.
Odd, he remarked finally. One has no sense of shock. Why is that, Peter? You know me. Why is it?
Never confess, my friend, he advised drowsily, clasping Melik’s hand. If you confess, they will keep you there forever.
Merridew might not have been the slenderest of men or the tallest. But he had grip, he had cunning and like many fat men he had unexpected resources of indignation which he was able to turn on like a...
It’s an old illness you suffer from, Mr. Smiley, she continued, taking a cigarette from the box; and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated from the body; it thinks without reality...
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.
Her palm was broad and strong and dry. Its nakedness against his own was like the gift of her entire body.