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A man who lies to himself and who listens to his own lies gets to a point where he can't distinguish any truth in himself or in those around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others […] A man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone else.
Heavens! how that man could talk! He electrified large meetings. He had the faith—don't you see?—he had the faith. He could get himself to believe anything—anything. He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party […] Any party […] He was an—an—extremist.
She wants it to mean again like meaning used to mean […] There is a new meanness in meaning.
In the Fall of 2017, I was teaching a course on spy fiction at the University of Massachusetts. Spy fiction at its best involves a world in which meaning is opaque and cryptography a matter of existential as well as national or political concern, but quite how this was to lead me to my current topic was unexpected. In the course, we had been reading John le Carré's novel The Spy