Treason Is Very Much A Matter Of

The Monsters Of Our Childhood Do Not Fade Away, Neither Are They Ever Wholly Monstrous.

God Is In His Heaven And The First Night Was A Wow.

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 Worked For Mi6 In The Sixties, During The Great Witch-hunts, When The Shared Paranoia Of The Cold War Gripped The Services.

A Spy, Like A Writer, Lives Outside The Mainstream Population. He Steals His Experience Through Bribes And Reconstructs It.