Hotel’s full up, I’m afraid, Mr. Roper, Jonathan rehearsed in another last-ditch effort to fend off the inevitable. Herr Meister is desolated. A temporary clerk has made an unpardonable error. However...
His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were.
He would set up as a mild eccentric, discursive, withdrawn, but possessing one or two lovable habits such as muttering to himself as he bumbled along pavements. Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't th...
He knew what it was then that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England: it was the caring about little things—the faith in ordinary life; the...
He has his chin on his chest and his eyes down. He is thinking of his new baby, his new novel, tomorrow's dance contest. He is thinking of everything except what he is thinking about.
George, this is history, Lacon protested weakly. This is not today.
Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it’s about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.
Beyond the typhoon shelters, ships slid past them, lighted buildings on the march, and the junks hobbled in their wakes. Inland, the Island whined and clanged and throbbed, and the huge slums twinkled...
And your wife, she's in the pink and so on? His expressions were also boyish. Very bonny, thank you, said Smiley, trying gallantly to respond in kind.
The striver in him knew that his first aim must be to rise in the system he dreamed of liberating.
Since nothing is more predictable than the media’s parroting of its own fictions and the terror of each competitor that it will be scooped by the others, whether or not the story is true, because
Si quelque chose peut nous sauver, ce dont je doute, ce sera la vanité (...) aucun chef d'état ne souhaite passer à la postérité comme étant le taré qui a anéanti son pays en un après-midi. Et puis la...
Changeful, occasionally wise and sympathetic. 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...
You’ll just have to take our word for it.’ ‘Your Service’s word?’ ‘For the time being, yes.’ ‘On the strength of what? Aren’t you supposed to be the gentlemen who lie for the good of their country?’ ‘...
You said they were friends, Mr Worthington. Sometimes third parties become intermediaries in these affairs.’ On the word affair, he looked up and found himself staring directly into Peter Worthington’...
You give the air of looking for someone, Sophie had said. But I think the missing person is yourself. Each
Yet in diplomacy nothing lasts, nothing is absolute, a conspiracy to murder is no grounds for endangering the flow of conversation.
When Schulmann talked, he fired off conflicting ideas like a spread of bullets, then waited to see which ones went home and which came back at him. The sidekick's voice followed like a stretcher-party...
We colonise them, Your Graces, we corrupt them, we exploit them, we bomb them, sack their cities, ignore their culture, and confound them with the infinite variety of our religious sects. We are hideo...
To be inhuman in defence of our humanity . . . harsh in defence of compassion. To be single-minded in defence of our disparity.