Multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world's sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders.

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

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

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion. Fifty years on, I don't associate the book with anything that ever happened to me, save for one wordless encounter at London airport when a worn-out, middle-aged military kind of man in a stained raincoat slammed a handful of mixed foreign change on to the bar and in gritty Irish accents ordered himself as much Scotch as it would buy. In that moment, Alec Leamas was born. Or so my memory, not always a reliable informant, tells me.

In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire.

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

Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.