An earnest party of travelers is engaged to find a mysterious holy city on behalf of a bloodthirsty and menacing tyrant – but despite the horrible external threats of fierce lizardmen, crazed ideologues and the nightmarish bedevilments of the past, it may be that the internal threats of mistrust, suspicion, and mutual intolerance are actually the more dangerous enemies.
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“The Purposes of Writing” is a transcript of an interview given by Jean-Paul Sartre in the middle part of the 1960s, when Europe was still coming to terms with the aftermath of World War II and the ways it had caused people (Sartre the minor Resistance fighter included) to behave and prior to the revolutionary fervor of 1968. In this interview, he addresses various aspects of the ways in which he and others write and the relationship between writing and commitment.
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A new generation of spies has taken over from the time of George Smiley and the Circus. Times have changed too, as the Cousins, who were once well-resourced allies at approximately the same level of ability, now bankroll all espionage operations–the Americans now routinely receive all intelligence discovered by the British services while occasionally and perhaps begrudgingly considering whether to release some needful titbit from time to time. Yet there remain times when a person on the spot can circumvent all the technology and resources that can be thrown at an operation: so, when a Russian publisher is looking to pass on a secret manuscript from a friend to a western contact who is not available, she gives it to a substitute whom she is obliged to trust in the hope that he will prove to be a good and faithful person.
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