Corridors of Power by C.P. Snow

That night I did my duty, and rang up Francis in Cambridge. I was angry with him, just as Rose had been with me, because I had to persuade him. I was angry because he was so stiff-necked and hard to persuade. I was angry with Margaret, because of love and her own high-principled temper she was saying what I wanted to say: that Francis and I should each of us resign and leave them to it.

But I felt something else, which I had not felt before, or not since I was a very young man – the intense, mescalin-vivid sense of being watched. When I picked up the receiver and asked for the Cambridge number, I was listening (was the line tapped? ) to sounds on the aural threshold. The clicks and tinkles seemed to me as though they had been picked up by an amplifier.