When it comes to recruiting people for the secret world, what the recruiters are looking for is pretty much what I had. I was unanchored, looking for an institution to look after me. I had a bit of larceny. I understood larceny. I understood the natural criminality in people - because it was - it was all around me. And I have no doubt there was a chunk of it inside me too. Once I found that identity, it took root in me. It exactly - it gelled with the world that I'd known in the past.

I mean, you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?

I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.

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'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.

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