Real Tigers (Slough House, #3)

by Mick Herron

chance encounters might happen in some places, to some people, but they never happened here, to spooks.

Taking another drink was not about lapsing. It was about becoming someone she planned never to be again.

“Jesus wept,”

The block’s rounded edges and metal-framed windows lent it a science-fiction air: this had once been how the future would look.

one thing everyone knew about alcoholism was, it wasn’t like the flu. You didn’t shake it off and carry on; you tamped it down and hoped it wouldn’t reignite.

there was no friend falser than another spook.

growed like Topsy.

the more secret something needed to be, the more arse-covering was necessary for when it leaked. And nothing covered departmental arse like reams and reams of paper.

Now, she carried her own weather with her.

that was only the most obvious thing about him, not the most important.

The same view every day, with minor variations.

Life’s cruellest trick was letting the light in, just enough so you knew where everything was, then shutting it off without warning.

Slow horses, after all, underwent the same training as any other kind.

real power, he’d told River more than once, lay in having one hand on the elbow of whoever was in charge.

Tracksuits were what you wore when things might get messy.

It was always a good idea to make a predator think you’re more vulnerable than you are.

If asked to list the greatest threats to the nation’s security, Ingrid Tearney would start with ministers and colleagues.

Spooks

Jackanory

Famous Five.”

Lamb was a Service legend,

London was more than one city.

There was always trouble, and he always rose from the resulting miasma looking a lovable scamp:

The public was like one of those huge Pacific jellyfish; one enormous, pulsating mass of indifference, drifting wherever the current carried it; an organism without a motive, ambition or original sin to call its own, but which somehow believed, in whatever passed for its brain, that it chose its own leaders and had a say in its own destiny.

spook architect,

primary purpose being not so much to keep you from getting where you were going, but to leave you unsure about where you’d been.

Every path led to a junction resembling the one you’d just left, offering routes to ...

“Fair dos.” He

All our problems would melt away if we could sit peacefully in a room.

Fractured pieces of wisdom, cobbled together from half-remembered axioms: put them together, and you had what passed for a philosophy, in the twilight world of the drunkard. And sober drunks could be just as dull as the real kind.

Everyone was a walking collection of angles,

Summer Holiday

Everywhere’s historical,

for courses.”

How long do memories last?

Happy as Larry.”

quotidian objectives.

anything that hadn’t actually gone tits up in the last five years was a hymn of praise to the free market.

Secret Seven.

“Jesus wept,”

improved communications don’t just let information travel faster, they let bullshit off the leash too.

when you know what people are prepared to believe, it makes it easier to bury uncomfortable truths.

“Even the complete bullshit, it’s useful to know who’s buying into it.

No sober day is wasted.

belief was not about actually believing; belief was simply somewhere to shelve hope.

wealth meant nothing if it didn’t create suffering.

it’s safe to assume there’s always something going on you don’t know about,” Lamb said.

Passwords were made to be captured,

“If I don’t feature in the paranoid fantasies of the internet’s bedsit warriors, I’m not doing my job properly.

This morning’s blues were someone else’s soundtrack.