I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.

Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.

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

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.

I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck.