I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

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

Let's die of it before we're too old.

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.

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.