Home's Where You Go When

Why Did I Desert Labour? Total Bloody Disillusionment. The Party Was A Corpse. It Had No Ideology, It Became Detached, Old, Spineless And Needed To Go.

Gerald Westerby, He Told Himself. You Were Present At Your Birth. You Were Present At Your Several Marriages And At Some Of Your Divorces, And You Will Certainly Be Present At Your Funeral. High Time, In Our Considered View, That You Were Present At Certain Other Crucial Moments In Your History.

Look... We're Getting To Be Old Men, And We've Spent Our Lives Looking For The Weaknesses In One Another's Systems. I Can See Through Eastern Values Just As You Can See Through Our Western Ones. Both Of Us, I Am Sure, Have Experienced Ad Nauseam The Technical Satisfactions Of This Wretched War. But Now Your Own Side Is Going To Shoot You. Don't You Think It's Time To Recognise That There Is As Little Worth On Your Side As There Is On Mine?

I Think I'm In The Same Mood As Ever, But In Some Ways More Mature. I Guess You Could Say That, At 65, When You've Seen The World Shape Up As I Have, There Are Only Two Things You Can Do: Laugh Or Kill Yourself.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold Was The Work Of A Wayward Imagination Brought To The End Of Its Tether By Political Disgust And Personal Confusion. Fifty Years On, I Don't Associate The Book With Anything That Ever Happened To Me, Save For One Wordless Encounter At London Airport When A Worn-out, Middle-aged Military Kind Of Man In A Stained Raincoat Slammed A Handful Of Mixed Foreign Change On To The Bar And In Gritty Irish Accents Ordered Himself As Much Scotch As It Would Buy. In That Moment, Alec Leamas Was Born. Or So My Memory, Not Always A Reliable Informant, Tells Me.