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In every operation came a lull. When it did, you shut your eyes and took inventory.
everything was information.
Queens of the Database
“Every organisation needs the odd shake-up. We’ll see how things stand once the dust settles.”
once a spook you were always a spook, and everything else was just cover.
Jesus wept!
titbits.
you turned into your mother, unless you turned into your father.
A copy of the Blue Book stood between a dictionary and a collected Sylvia Plath in the sitting room, and there was nothing to stop her settling down with it, peppermint tea at her elbow, until the wobble passed.
If you don’t know something, ask. But before you ask, try to work it out for yourself.
you can discover an awful lot from the details you’re asked to believe.
Richard Curtis
saddoes
“Jesus wept,”
The workers’ paradise is today run by gangsters and capitalists. Much like the west.”
the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to make people stop believing in him,”
all joes believe in the devil, don’t they? Deep down, during their darkest nights, all joes believe in the devil.”
It was so obviously a place where a spook might sit and think spook thoughts that nobody who knew the first thing about spooks would imagine any spook stupid enough to use it.
it’s as relevant now as a cassette tape.
he’d yet to meet a suit who didn’t think themselves a samurai.
the students from the nearby drama school were invulnerable to embarrassment, and would happily perform while walking to the tube.
“Jesus wept,”
Lesser talents would need a whole novel to tell you that much,
Tom Conti,
recce,
It wasn’t dark, but only because there was a city outside, pouring its electric wash over everything.
Every hangover she’d ever known—beer, tequila, cocaine, sex—had left her furtive and hunted.
the blankets and newspapers taped across windows betrayed the low-paid status of their inhabitants.
Moscow Rules.
she had a contact there. She didn’t like to say ‘dealer’: dealer implied habit; habit implied problem; and Shirley didn’t have a problem, she had a lifestyle.
handbills pasted to the walls for open-mic poetry nights, local bands, the Stop the City rally, transgender cabarets.
she didn’t dance where she shopped.
The friendlier the territory, the scarier the natives.”
it’s dangerous personalising an enemy.
the best hits were carried out by the least likely hitters.
kerbs
The Downside Man,
Strategy was nine tenths reaction. Study any situation too long, you can think yourself into paralysis.
all the heavy artillery a city threw at the sky,
If you carried on looking like you were holding it all together, pretty soon you were holding it all together.
the whole point about emergencies was you didn’t expect them.
Ave Satani.
History, that is. Means your family’s blood’s been spilt there.
Where there is money, there is also sex.
where there’s sex, trouble follows.
Jesus wept,
Nick Clegged.
This isn’t an Agatha Christie.”
“I don’t care if it’s a Dan Brown.
Going Amish,
