It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.

In the 66 years that I have been alive, there has not been one hour, of one day, of one month, of one year, when there has not been a threat aimed at us.

On Foreign Secretary Robin Cook: If a man cannot keep a measly affair secret, what is he doing in charge of the Intelligence Service?

The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshipped the other genocide, Josef Stalin. It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century.

He was one of the masters of the thriller and he really was one of the great signposts, because he took the spy thriller out of the gentility of the drawing room and into the back streets of Istanbul and where it all really happened, ... The Day of the Jackal.

The stubbornness of a weak man should never be underestimated. The weak tend to be very stubborn when they've decided on something.

It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.