Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

Look... we're getting to be old men, and we've spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems. I can see through Eastern values just as you can see through our Western ones. Both of us, I am sure, have experienced ad nauseam the technical satisfactions of this wretched war. But now your own side is going to shoot you. Don't you think it's time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.

Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.