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Mick Herron Biography

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“Those who knew him said it was how he'd have wanted to go. Dieter Hess died in his armchair, surrounded by his books, a half-glass of 2008 Burgundy at his elbow, a half-smoked Montecristo in the ashtray on the floor. In his lap, Yeats's Collected - the yellow-jacketed Macmillan edition - and in the CD tray Pärt's Für Alina, long hushed by the time Bachelor found the body, but its lingering silences implicit in the air, settling like dust on faded surfaces.”

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Book:The List
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“So the PM's tame Muslim celebrity turns out to be what we're not allowed to say is usually found lurking in the woodpile, and the man responsible for establishing said Muslim's credentials has fallen down on the job. The PM does rather seem to have be lacking in judgement, doesn't he?" "Almost as if a replacement were called for." "And who better than the hero of the referendum? Darling, happy endings are so rare in politics. This one will be celebrated for years." Like other newspaper columnists, like other politicians, they genuinely thought themselves beloved.”

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Book:London Rules
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“Thus was born the Service Archive, a ‘tool for correlating current events with historical precedents’, which would be of incalculable strategic use assuming it was ever actually operational. Currently, though, its status was not dissimilar to that of countless other Civil Service projects, in that its existence had been ordained, the process for bringing it into being had been set in motion, and it would thus continue gestating until it was officially put a stop to, despite having long been forgotten about by everyone concerned in its conception.”

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Book:London Rules
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“But the first bedtime story he ever did read me was Kim.' River could tell she recognised the title, so didn't elaborate. 'After that, well, Conrad, Greene. Somerset Maugham.' 'Ashenden.' 'You get the picture. For my twelfth birthday, he bought me le Carré's collected works. I can still remember what he said about them.' They're made up. But that doesn't mean they're not true.”

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Book:Slow Horses
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“For months the previous year she had monitored message boards for suggestions of terrorist activity, and while she'd never entirely thrown off the suspicion that every other poster she encountered was an undercover cop, she'd grown used to eavesdropping on tin-hat conversations, from how the government was controlling the weather to the thought-experiments carried out on anyone who rang HMRC helplines. And all of these philosophers, without exception, were convinced they were under surveillance, their every online foray or mobile chat recorded and stored for future use. That this was probably true was an irrelevance, of course; they were simply caught in the same net as everyone else. Louisa had never trapped a terrorist; never stopped a bomb. She'd read it lot of discussions about 9/11, obviously, but contributions from structural engineers had been conspicuous by their absence. And while the helpline thing wag probably true, that was just the law of averages at work.”

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Book:Real Tigers
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“You didn't have to go back far to recall a culture that said: Yes, we like a drink at lunchtime. The political culture, he meant—Peter Judd was well aware that the culture in general was chucking booze down its neck like a mental hobo. But the political culture, meaning Westminster, had cleaned up its act since the millennium, a shift in which Judd himself had played no small part. A public disavowal of some of the more famous extravagances of his youth had, near as damn it, established a party line, or at least had drawn a line across which his party didnt dare tread... Once the House's reputation for being more or less sober during daylight hours had been salvaged, and his own status as architect of the "New Responsibility" (copyright, some broadsheet reptile) safely established, Judd was happy to revert to drinking at lunchtime when he felt like it.”

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Book:Real Tigers
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“The exit inclined towards a roundabout from which Ho peeled off onto a minor road, its edges potholed and broken, and over which trees dangled follage like fishermen hoping for a bite. Theoretically trees were a good thing, lungs of the planet, and Ho didn't mind them in parks, but out here they loomed too large, the way unleashed dogs acquired extra menace. They cast their shadows as if it were only by their permission that traffic was allowed to pass beneath, and Roddy Ho felt what he'd have called a threat to his sense of self, were such terms available to him. Instead, he simply noted that they were fucking creepy, and constituted a hazard. He made a mental note to do something about them, saved it in the folder When I'm King, and checked satnav again.”

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Book:Real Tigers
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