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Kindle Notes & Highlights
In the beginning was not the word but the deed, Goethe tells us through the agency of his Faust, and Smiley refuses to shirk from action where he believes in the rightness of his cause.
“Give these people a try, Smiley, they might have you and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company.”
By the strength of his intellect, he forced himself to observe humanity with clinical objectivity, and because he was neither immortal nor infallible he hated and feared the falseness of his life.
it dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle age without ever being young,
It comforted the Great to deal with a man they knew, a man who could reduce any colour to grey,
malgré lui,
the kind of friendly spirit who always has a timetable and a penknife.
suspicion, experience, perception, common sense—for Maston these were not the organs of fact. Paper was fact, Ministers were fact, Home Secretaries were hard fact.
Money to burn he had, came off him like leaves in autumn.
He had the nerve not to drink in a university where you proved your manhood by being drunk most of your first year.
how I could bleat about artistic freedom when a third of Europe was in chains. Did it mean nothing to me that contemporary civilization was being bled to death? What was so sacred about the eighteenth century that I could throw the twentieth away?
It was all over.
(Gotta love it when this sentence occurs only three quarters of the way through the book.)
hated what he stood for more strongly than ever before: it was the fabulous impertinence of renouncing the individual in favour of the mass. When had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom?
It was felt that publicity, whatever form it took, would ultimately rebound against the nation’s interests.
"redound" would be a better word choice, no?
locked away with his arid paper and his shiny politicians.
