Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.

It was a charming fantasy of romantics that the spies would stop spying, that political conflict would end and politicians would tell the truth. Unfortunately that has not been the case.

...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

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.

I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British.

What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?