Literary Birthday – 28 June – Eric Ambler

Eric Ambler was born 28 June 1909, and died 22 October 1998.

Six Quotes

1. Propaganda always begins with words, but soon it proceeds to deeds. When there are no facts to support lies, facts must be made.
2. A man’s features, the bone structure and the tissue which covers it, are the product of a biological process; but his face he creates for himself. It is a statement of his habitual emotional attitude; the attitude which his desires need for their fulfilment and which his fears demand for their protection from prying eyes. He wears it like a devil mask; a device to evoke in others the emotions complementary to his own.
3. International business may conduct its operations with scraps of paper, but the ink it uses is human blood.
4. In a dying civilisation, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.
5. It was the power of Business, not the deliberations of statesman, that shaped the destinies of nations. The Foreign Ministers of the great powers might make the actual declarations of their Governments’ policies; but it was the Big Business men, the bankers and their dependants, the arms manufacturers, the oil companies, the big industrialists, who determined what those policies should be.
6. The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.

Eric Ambler was an influential British author of spy novels who introduced a new realism to the genre. John Le Carre once described him as ‘the source on which we all draw’. He is best known for  The Mask of Dimitrios and The Light of Day.Source

by Amanda Patterson

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