A Committee Is An Animal With Four

Only Esmeralda Was Not Weeping. Instead She Wore That Wooden Look That Whites Mistake For Churlishenss Or Indifference. Woodrew Knew It Was Neither. It Was Familiarity. This How Real Life Is Constituted, It Said. This Is Grief And Hatred And People Hacked To Death. This Is The Everyday We Have Known Since We Were Born And You Wazungu Have Not.

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.

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

Life Was To Be A Search, Or Nothing! But It Was The Fear That It Was Nothing That Drove Me Forward. Every Encounter Was An Encounter With Myself.

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