Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

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

A good man knows when to sacrifice himself, a bad man survives but loses his soul.

Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.

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

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

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.