Press coverage of the industry was boosterish and sedulously uninvestigative, as journalists tended to embrace Google’s old “Don’t be evil” motto as a factual description of its aims

a bevy (it really is the only word for it, echt B-movie stuff) of beautiful girls surrounded me

a terrible trial for poor Angus, who felt he’d done nothing to deserve it. He stalked off the yacht at the earliest possible opportunity, injured innocence writ large on his brow.

spend the afternoons swimming in the limpid water

I have noticed this tendency to reductionism in X before. The text is infinitely variegated, the subtext always the same.

American spies are naïfs or pallid sidekicks

The mole offers the spy story its mise en abyme: their every act is at once real and false, an embodied double negative; they threaten at every moment to double or triple themselves

Even the spy’s sexiness is bathetic

The agency may in fact be the villain in most postwar spy stories: it tries to eliminate Jason Bourne, it traduces its employees like Milo Weaver or David Morgan

is also the least homiletic