A courtship gets quickly under way. On Friday evenings Mundy will collect Kate from school, arriving early for the pleasure of watching her cope with swarms of multiethnic children. At the Hampstead Everyman cinema Kate pays for her own ticket. Over Dutch dinners at the Bacchus Greek taverna they...
The Gulf war had just begun. Throughout the day, news of the Allied bombings, discreetly relayed by the staff, had caused consternation on the Zürich stock exchange. Hotel bookings, which in any January were low, had sunk to crisis levels. Once more in her long history Swi...
"Palestinian commandos. Our part of town." Michel's part too, she thought proudly. You will find them an easy people to love,Joseph had told her. Charlie spent four nights and four days with the boys, and loved them singly and collectively. They wer...
The piano is locked. The key, well out of Hugo’s reach, shares a picture hook with an unknown Florentine master whose value old Niesthal has guaranteed, he does business only with friends. In the hall, the carved eighteenth-century fireplace, completed in all but the pointing, is draped in Haverd...
Now as he drove the hired Rover past the unlovable façades of the Edgware Road, the wind had dropped, the sky was black with waiting rain, and all that remained of the sun was a lingering redness on the tarmac. He parked in St. John’s Wood Road, in the forecourt of a new tower block with a glass ...
If London was holding its summer late, then so, one might have thought, was Jerry. Stepmothers; vaccinations, travel touts, literary agents and Fleet Street editors; Jerry, though he loathed London like the pest, took them all in his cheery pounding stride. He even had a London persona to go with...
The time was half past five, the summer weather erratic. After fierce rain showers all day long, a false sunlight was blazing in the puddles and raising vapour from the pavements. Of the passers-by, the younger ones wore jeans and sneakers, but their elders were still huddled in their warms.The r...
The airport reminded Leamas of the war: machines, half hidden in the fog, waiting patiently for their masters; the resonant voices and their echoes, the sudden shout and the incongruous clip of a girl’s heels on a stone floor; the roar of an engine that might have been at your elbow. Everywhere t...
Leclerc refused to go into the Cadena and they walked interminably until they found another café, worse than the Cadena and more expensive.‘I can’t remember him,’ Leclerc said. ‘That’s the absurd thing. He’s a trained radio operator apparently. Or was in those days.’Avery thought he was talking a...
"But, Ockie, they've got all the guns in the world!" "You're being stupid deliberately. The Russian mafia. Don't you read the newspapers?" "But Russia's awash with guns and everything else. The military's been selling them off to all corners for years." "There's mafias and mafias over there. Mayb...
He had slid off her, she could no longer smell his sweat and breath. But she could feel his bulk at the foot of the bed and sometimes she had a hard time remembering that they had not made love a few moments earlier, for his habit in those days had been to leave her dozing while he sat as he was ...
When she left him two years later in favour of a Cuban motor racing driver, she announced enigmatically that if she hadn't left him then, she never could have done; and Viscount Sawley made a special journey to his club to observe that the cat was out of the bag. This remark, which enjoyed a brie...
Bonn was a Balkan city, stained and secret, drawn over with tramwire. Bonn was a dark house where someone had died, a house draped in Catholic black and guarded by policemen. Their leather coats glistened in the lamplight, the black flags hung over them like birds. It was as if all but they had h...
All day long the same grey gloom had hung over the courtyard, consigning her tiny universe to a perpetual evening. At dawn a sepia glow had thickened it; at midday, soon after the men came, it was a celestial power-cut, deepening to a cavernous black in anticipation of her own end. And now, at ev...
The conductor was a very surly man with a great deal to say about the bus company, and why it lost money. Gently encouraged by Smiley, he expanded wonderfully so that by the time they arrived at Sturminster he had transformed the Directors of the Dorset and General Traction Company into a herd of...
he declares proudly, once more reciting from speeches he has made to himself for hours on end. “I loved that in her from the start. She was so desperate to have our child at once. The death of her parents must be compensated as soon as possible! Why wait till we were married? I held her back. I s...
Fram is the name of the boat designed by the famous Norwegian explorer Nansen, a top member of Brother Michael’s pantheon of men of action. Fram in the Norwegian language means onwards, and Fram was what inspired my dear late father to ride his heretic’s bicycle across the Pyrenees. And Fram will...
Bachmann had spent the night plowing through background files on Chechen jihadis, prepared for him by Erna Frey, who, in a rare burst of self-indulgence, had taken herself off to Hanover for a niece’s wedding. His reading complete, he had been thinking of flying up to Copenhagen and having a coup...