Some problems—take Ireland—were insoluble, but you would never get the Americans to admit anything was insoluble.
Some fieldmen, and particularly the clever ones, take a perverse pride in not knowing the whole picture. Their art consists in the deft handling of loose ends, and stops there stubbornly.
Smiley. Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad. Sawley, in fact, declared at t...
Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
Shane was horrid to her, always sneering at her because she was honest and simple about the things she liked. Shane hated Stella—I think it was because Stella didn’t want to be a lady of quality. She...
Outside the school's walls the Swinging Sixties are in full cry, but inside them the band of Empire plays on. Twice-daily chapel services praise the school's war dead to the detriment of its living, v...
Most of all he asked about their philosophy. To Leamas that was the most difficult question of all. ‘What do you mean, a philosophy?’ he replied. ‘We’re not Marxists, we’re nothing. Just people.’ ‘Are...
It was like feeding a small child. You couldn't over load the spoon.
In Lacon's world, direct questions were the height of bad taste, but direct answers were worse.
I wished I could make them throw everything over for a flawed and impossible passion, only to see the objective it turn against them, proving there is no reward for love except the experience of lovin...
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.
En cualquier interrogatorio, la negación es el punto de inflexión.
Coffee he drinks—nothing else—just coffee all the time. He says Germans are too introspective to make good agents, and it all comes out in counterintelligence. He says counterintelligence people are l...
And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackens, that his life had consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to d...
And from there, he wandered off into an argument with Friedrich Schiller's grandiose statement that human stupidity was what the gods fought in vain. Not so, in Toby's opinion, and no excuse for anybo...
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...
Si les Américains s'étaient donné autant de mal pour le désarmement que pour envoyer un pauvre type sur la lune, ou coller des rayures roses dans le dentifrice, on l'aurait depuis longtemps, le désarm...