It was his shoes, he noticed to his pleasure, that she most objected to; and he thought: bloody good, that's what shoes are for. - John le Carré

Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant.

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

I can’t understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretenses has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed. We’ve always got to be careful of that. I think that — I wasn’t speaking as a prophet, I was just speaking as an angry citizen, I suppose. I think it’s true that we’ve caused irreparable damage in the Middle East. I think we shall pay for it for a long time.