More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

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

I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.

I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.

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.