The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

by John Le Carré

He favoured shirts of the American kind with buttons on the points of the collars, and suede shoes with rubber soles.

Fawley didn’t like Leamas, and if Leamas knew he didn’t care. Fawley was a man who belonged to Clubs and wore representative ties, pontificated on the skills of sportsmen, and assumed a service rank in office correspondence. He thought Leamas suspect, and Leamas thought him a fool.

the same apologetic adherence to a code of behaviour which he pretended to find ridiculous. The same banality.

Leamas was lost. He’d heard the man talked a lot of drivel before getting the knife in, but he’d never heard anything like this before.

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

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.