An Officer and a Spy

...it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre...

There is no such thing as a secret—not really, not in the modern world, not with photography and telegraphy and railways and newspaper presses.

There are occasions when losing is a victory, so long as there is a fight.

Bachelors of forty are society’s stray cats. We are taken in by households and fed and made a fuss of;

This sort of talk always bores me: old men complaining that the world is going to the dogs. It’s so banal.

My four golden principles are more important now than ever: take it one step at a time; approach the matter dispassionately; avoid a rush to judgement; confide in nobody until there is hard evidence.

I feel as if I have walked into a mirrored room and glimpsed myself from an unfamiliar angle for the first time. Is that really what I look like? Is that who I am?

Outwardly, I hope, I wear my usual mask of detachment, even irony, for there has never been a situation,however dire, even this one, that did not strike me as containing at least some element of the human comedy.

The old days of an inner circle of like-minded souls communicating with parchment and quill pens are gone. Sooner or later most things will be revealed.

I lay aside the papers. Really, it is beyond hypocrisy; it is beyond even lying: it has become a psychosis.

Isn’t an awareness of their transience what gives these moments their exquisite edge?

take it one step at a time; approach the matter dispassionately; avoid a rush to judgement; confide in nobody until there is hard evidence.

old men complaining that the world is going to the dogs.

It is my first lesson in the cabalistic power of “secret intelligence”: two words that can make otherwise sane men abandon their reason and cavort like idiots.

Socially, he has the bore’s trick of seeking one’s opinion on something – in this case he asks my view of the impending state visit of the Russian tsar – and listening to it with barely disguised impatience, until he is at last able to interrupt and launch into his own prepared monologue.

it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre;