The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

by John Le Carré

To the hard-liners of East and West the Second World War was a distraction. Now that it was over, they could get on with the real war that had started with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and had been running under different flags and disguises ever since.

Former Nazis with attractive qualifications weren’t just tolerated by the Allies, they were positively mollycoddled for their anti-Communist credentials.

it asked the same old question that we are asking ourselves fifty years later: how far can we go in the rightful defense of our Western values without abandoning them along the way?

“I mean, you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?”

What have I learned over the last fifty years? Come to think of it, not much. Just that the morals of the secret world are very like our own.

mean you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?” He laughed quietly to himself: “That would never do,” he said.

Everywhere that air of conspiracy which generates among people who have been up since dawn—of superiority almost, derived from the common experience of having seen the night disappear and the morning come.

He knew what it was then that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England: it was the caring about little things—the faith in ordinary life; the simplicity that made you break up a bit of bread into a paper bag, walk down to the beach, and throw it to the gulls. It was this respect for triviality which he had never been allowed to possess; whether it was bread for the seagulls or love, whatever it was he would go back and find it; he would make Liz find it for him.

“it is not fashionable to quote Stalin—but he said once ‘half a million liquidated is a statistic, and one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy.’

react to. But seven people were nothing: they were worse than nothing, because they were evidence of the inertia of the uncapturable mass. They broke your heart.

“This is a war,” Leamas replied. “It’s graphic and unpleasant because it’s fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it’s nothing, nothing at all besides other wars—the last or the next.”