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.

After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.

I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.

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

For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.

When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.

It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day.