‘Those are usually the chaps who love the army best,’ (Location 987)
Returning to the son, Burr pored over reports of Jonathan’s progress through army foster homes, civilian orphanages and the Duke of York’s Military School in Dover. Their inconsistency quickly incensed him. Timid ran one; plucky another; a solitary, a grand mixer, an inward boy, an outgoing one, a natural leader, lacks charisma, back and forth like a pendulum. And once, very involved with foreign languages, as if this were a morbid symptom of something better left alone. But it was the word unreconciled that got Burr’s goat: ‘Who the hell ever decreed,’ he demanded indignantly, ‘that a sixteen-year-old boy of no fixed abode, who’s never had a chance to know parental love, should be reconciled?’ (Location 991)
then He ran up our Jonathan to restore the ecological balance.’ (Location 1010)
Note: manichean
bureaucracy. They liked him better still when it became clear that he had forsaken the unsavoury preserves of Pure Intelligence for the hard tack of defeating the enemy. Pure Intelligence for them meant all things bad, whether it resided in Langley or the River House. It meant turning a blind eye to some of the biggest crooks in the hemisphere for the sake of nebulous advantages elsewhere. (Location 1041)
Note: authors note!
‘You can be exploitative, or you can enforce. Be exploitative, that’s a never-ending story: that’s recruiting the enemy so that you catch the next enemy. Then recruit the next enemy so that you catch the next one, ad infinitum. Enforce, that’s what we have in mind for Mr Roper. A fugitive from justice, in my book you apprehend him, you charge him under the International Trafficking in Arms regulations, and you lock him up. Exploitation, in the end you get to ask yourself who’s being exploited: the fugitive, or the public, or justice.’ ‘Strelski is a maverick,’ (Location 1083)
Padstow had been up at Oxford at the same time as Goodhew, but the only thing Goodhew remembered about him was that he had seemed to have a mission to the plainer girl. (Location 1632)
was running up her totals on the electronic till (Location 1665)
When her mother drove her to dementia (Location 2544)
Note: eh
Jonathan walked round to the washrooms behind the kitchen and changed into his whites, remembering Yvonne, which he did each time he put them on. Yvonne had temporarily supplanted Sophie as the object of his self-distaste. The bubble of nervousness in his stomach had a sexual urgency. (Location 3002)
