It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day.

I can't think of anybody worse to live with.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.

A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.

Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.

I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.