I've always had difficulties with female characters.

For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.

If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.

Everyone who is not happy must be shot.

The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.

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

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.