Treason Is Very Much A Matter Of

Why Did I Desert Labour? Total Bloody Disillusionment. The Party Was A Corpse. It Had No Ideology, It Became Detached, Old, Spineless And Needed To Go.

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.

When The World Is Destroyed, It Will Be Destroyed Not By Its Madmen But By The Sanity Of Its Experts And The Superior Ignorance Of Its Bureaucrats.

I Once Heard Someone Say Morality Was Method. Do You Hold With That? I Suppose You Wouldn't. You Would Say That Morality Was Vested In The Aim, I Expect. Difficult To Know What One's Aims Are, That's The Trouble, Specially If You're British.

To Possess Another Language Is To Possess Another Soul.