Boadicea

“Those who are treated as pariahs become pariahs—just as, to quote Auden, those to whom evil is done do evil in return.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“When people ask me whether I am a spy –‘are you now, or have you ever been?’ –I am tempted to reply with a hearty –‘Yes, and since the age of five.’ For a state of watchfulness must surely be the first requisite of a writer, as it is of a secret agent. A writer, like a spy, must prey upon his neighbours; like a spy he is dependent on those whom he deceives; like a spy he must somehow contrive to keep a distance from his own feelings and by doing so conjure up a package that will meet with the approval of his masters. Like a spy, he is not merely an outsider, but implicitly a subversive..”
― John le Carré

“Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee...Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us...We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within… We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.”
― John le Carré

“She hardly cared. They wanted her. They knew her through and through; they knew her fragility and her plurality. And they still wanted her. They had stolen her in order to rescue her. After all her drifting, their straight line. After all her guilt and concealment, their acceptance. After all her words, their action, their abstemiousness, their clear-eyed zeal, their authenticity, their true allegiance, to fill the emptiness that had yawned and screamed inside her like a bored demon ever since she could remember.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl