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

As our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.

It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.

Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

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.

By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.