The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief.

As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself.

Ask most people who live in a home and have a mortgage on it whether they own their own home and the answer is almost guaranteed to be a resounding 'yes'. Yet it's the wrong answer. Technically speaking, until they have paid the mortgage off, they don't own it. Herein lies the difference between reality and illusion, between ownership and control. This confusion lies not only at the individual level, but also at the heart of government thinking.

In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even show passes to go in and out of the building.

The next time someone uses denial of citizenship as a weapon or brandishes the special status conferred upon him by the accident of birth, ask him this: What have you done lately to earn it?

It's a funny thing about cities: Some have brief, bright moments of cultural and political dominance, decades- or centuries-long spells when they seem the center of their particular nation, or region, or empire... only to later fall into obscurity and disrepair, never to regain their former glory.