Shoes and a leather jacket. When Burr had
Has delegated swathes of its own foreign policy to its spies, a thing the United States has done rather too frequently in recent years.
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?’ ‘...
Why are Scots so attracted to the secret world? Smiley wondered, not for the first time in his career. Ships’ engineers, Colonial administrators, spies. . . . Their heretical Scottish history drew the...
Why and earth should an unshaven young man in a track suit be carrying a basket of oranges and yesterday's newspaper? The whole boat must of noticed him!
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.
There were times when he confronted his own image as a man confronts an empty valley, and the vision propelled him forward again to experience as despair compels us to extinction. Sometimes he was lik...
The bad dream turned out to be one that a lot of people in the world were sharing, since it asked the same old question that we are asking ourselves fifty years later: how far can we go in the rightfu...
She hardly cared. They wanted her. They knew her through and through; they knew her fragility and her plurality. And they still wanted her. They had stolen her in order to rescue her. After all her dr...
Probably she said yes. Afterwards she was not sure. She saw his scared gaze lift and stare at the approaching bus. She saw an indecision near to panic seize him, and it occurred to her – which in the...
Lo raccontò in maniera semplice ma precisa, come un buon soldato rievoca una battaglia, non più col sapore della vittoria o della sconfitta ma unicamente con l'emozione del ricordo.
It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three.
It is a prison for those who fail to recognize socialist reality; for those who think they have the right to err; for those who slow down the march. Traitors, she concluded briefly. But what have they...
It dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle-age without ever being young, and that he was, in the nicest possible way, on the shelf.
Information is not knowledge, mind you.
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...
Everything in the world is true if you invent it hard enough and love the person it’s for!
Enemies I do not fear, Villem. But friends I fear greatly.’ Smiley