Completing A Book, It's A Little Like

Remember Graham Green's Dictum That Childhood Is The Bank Balance Of The Writer? I Think That All Writers Feel Alienated. Most Of Us Go Back To An Alienated Childhood In Some Way Or Another. I Know That I Do.

Out Of Date, Perhaps, But Who Wasn't These Days? Out Of Date, But Loyal To His Own Time. At A Certain Moment, After All, Every Man Chooses: Will He Go Forward, Will He Go Back? There Was Nothing Dishounorable 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.

In The Hands Of Politicians Grand Designs Achieve Nothing But New Forms Of The Old Misery.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold Was The Work Of A Wayward Imagination Brought To The End Of Its Tether By Political Disgust And Personal Confusion. Fifty Years On, I Don't Associate The Book With Anything That Ever Happened To Me, Save For One Wordless Encounter At London Airport When A Worn-out, Middle-aged Military Kind Of Man In A Stained Raincoat Slammed A Handful Of Mixed Foreign Change On To The Bar And In Gritty Irish Accents Ordered Himself As Much Scotch As It Would Buy. In That Moment, Alec Leamas Was Born. Or So My Memory, Not Always A Reliable Informant, Tells Me.

I Grew Up In A Completely Bookless Household. It Was My Father's Boast That He Had Never Read A Book From End To End. I Don't Remember Any Of His Ladies Being Bookish. So I Was Entirely Dependent On My Schoolteachers For My Early Reading With The Exception Of The Wind In The Willows, Which A Stepmother Read To Me When I Was In Hospital.