And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day. Because they have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.

Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.

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

But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.

Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.

Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishenss or indifference. Woodrew knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not.

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.