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

It was a charming fantasy of romantics that the spies would stop spying, that political conflict would end and politicians would tell the truth. Unfortunately that has not been the case.

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.

I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

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.

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

For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.