Was anyone else mentioned?' 'Esterhase,' Jim snapped, in the same taut tone. 'Bloody man wanted to know how anyone could trust a Hungarian.
To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul.
To Tabitha, these are facts of history. For those of us who endured them, they are a time of despair, bewilderment and frustration.
These are true stories told from memory – to which you are entitled to ask, what is truth, and what is memory to a creative writer in what we may delicately call the evening of his life? To the lawyer...
There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.
There is a kind of stupidity among the drunks, particularly when they are sober...
The classified cat watches from the kitchen window.
That’s the trouble with Americans, isn’t it, really? All that emphasis on the future. So dangerous. It makes them destructive of the present.
Sometimes she thought Alec was right—you believed in things because you needed to; what you believed in had no value of its own, no function. What did he say: A dog scratches where it itches. Differen...
Some problems—take Ireland—were insoluble, but you would never get the Americans to admit anything was insoluble.
Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
Middle children weep longer than their brothers and sisters. Over her mother’s shoulder, stilling her pains and her injured pride, Jackie Lacon watched the party leave. First, two men she had not seen...
Look... we're getting to be old men, and we've spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems. I can see through Eastern values just as you can see through our Western ones. Both...
It’s my innocence, he explains. Your what? He reiterates, very precisely. Our problem, Timbo, is my purblind, incurable, omnivorous innocence. I can’t leave life alone. I love it. Its fictions and its...
It is not fashionable to quote Stalin but he said once, half a million liquidated is a statistic, but one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy. He was laughing, you see, at the bourg...
Intelligence work has one moral law - it is justified by results.
In capitalist America economic repression of the masses is institutionalised to a point which not even Lenin could have foreseen . . . The
In Lacon's world, direct questions were the height of bad taste, but direct answers were worse.
He was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment.
He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man.