Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

‘Well, I’m Ed,’ he volunteers, repeating Alice’s information for my benefit. In the England I have recently returned to, nobody has a surname.

‘What about all the tunnel-vision fanatics he’s got round him? The fundamentalist Christians who think Jesus invented greed?

The biggest gift you can give the young is time,

The British public is being marched over a cliff by a bunch of rich elitist carpetbaggers posing as men of the people.

Or are we dealing with a case of what the Office shrinks are pleased to call camel’s-back syndrome, when the things you’re not allowed to talk about suddenly outweigh the things that you are, and you go down temporarily under the strain?

Dom doesn’t do confrontation, which is something we both know. His life is a sideways advance between things he can’t face.

The uses of open word-code are older than the Bible and rest on mutual understandings between writer and recipient.

Thanks to Putin and his gang of unredeemed Stalinists, Russia was not going forward to a bright future, but backwards into her dark, delusional past.

Nobody dreams any more, hear me?

He has lived more lives than I ever shall. He has finished up with none.

Sometimes in life you get caught for sins you haven’t committed.

‘Don’t interrogate me, Nat. I’m not your property any more!’ ‘I’m surprised you ever thought you were.’ Our first lovers’ tiff and we never made love.