Bunny had put on his legal face. No more squeezing of the eyes. No more raising the voice for a slow-witted older man who doesn’t hear too well.
“I want to go back to where we came in—that all right with you? You and the Rule of Law. The Service and the Rule of Law. Do I have your full attention?”
“I suppose so.”
“I mentioned to you the British public’s insatiable interest in historic crime. Something by no means lost on our gallant parliamentarians.”
“Did you? Probably.”
“Or the law courts. The historic blame game that is the current rage. Our new national sport. Today’s blameless generation versus your guilty one. Who will atone for our fathers’ sins, even if they weren’t sins at the time?”
—From A Legacy of Spies, a novel by John le Carré, described by the publisher as being about “Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London…and now are to be scrutinized by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience for its justifications.”
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The novel echoes a description once made of journalists: “Journalists watch the battle from high on a hill and when the battle is over they come down and shoot the wounded.”
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