It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.

Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.

After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.

I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.

I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.

The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom; to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy.