Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.

The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom; to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy.

The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.

It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.

People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem.

Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.

Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.