The Private Lives of Spies and The Exquisite Art of Getting Even: Stories of Espionage and Revenge

by Alexander McCall Smith

spies, Syphax and Omar, who were, in spite of being on opposite sides, great friends. Sides are often arbitrary—the result of historical accident: friendship can be much more important than allegiance and membership, and can, sometimes, outrank other, lesser loyalties.

Sooner or later, the place where you are destined to be will come and claim you. It always does. You may think you’ve escaped, but you never have: like gravity, such places pull you back, assert their control of your life. You won’t get away from us that easily, say these places. We are your place; this is where you are destined to die, however long your life may prove to be. Don’t fight it; submit, and in your acceptance you may find peace and contentment. Many do.

Identities are interesting, aren’t they? We can pick the one we feel best expresses something within us.

“Very tall,” said Guy Burgess. “Bourgeois as hell—but aren’t we all? Rather good-looking, but then again, aren’t we all?”

He went outside, got into the green Pontiac station wagon, and drove off. Into history. Each of us has a little bit of history—not much perhaps—into which we can drive off.

Nothing changes, you see, Monsieur Citroën: very little in human affairs is new.

Exacting revenge adds to the sum total of human suffering, rather than subtracts from it.

Forgiveness is more healing than the infliction of pain: there is ample evidence for that proposition, as any study of conflict resolution will tend to confirm. You don’t necessarily get better by making another suffer.

coloured moustache he had cultivated above his upper lip. “Today,” he said

To recognise that is not to commit oneself to a completely deterministic view of human action; it is simply to recognise the truth of the proposition that who we are and how we view the world may be determined by the bed in which we happen to be born, by the society in which we grow up, and by the beliefs with which we are endowed.

“To have assured supplies of garlic is so…so reassuring, I always say.”

It was about garlic, and yearning, and disappointment, and justice. It was about so many different things.

Forgiveness heals; it allows us to unclutter our lives with the business of the past; it makes room for human flourishing. It also facilitates the happy ending, which is what we want in most, if not all, the books we read, and in life too.

And Shakespeare had left us all those lines of pain and regret and beauty. He had left them there, to be misinterpreted by just about everybody, but to be understood by those who felt as he did about this, whatever this was.