The Honourable Schoolboy (George Smiley, #6; Karla Trilogy #2)

by John Le Carré

He typed the eagle’s way, she told them later amid admiring laughter: much circling before he swooped. He wore what

Beth Sanders understood the intensity of isolated people, and knew that in barren places their intelligence must fix on tiny matters.

childhood spent listening to his father’s bellowing had taught him early the value of big ideas, and big words as well. Perhaps that was what had joined him to the girl in the first place, he thought. That’s what she was on about: “Don’t give me anything I can’t carry.”

But I think it safer to stay with institutions, if you don’t mind. In that way we are spared the embarrassment of personalities. After all, that’s what institutions are for, isn’t it?”

There is a particular intensity about clever men whose brains are under-used, and sometimes there is no way they can control their emanations. In that sense, they are a great deal more at risk under the bright lights than their more stupid colleagues.

Guillam was exhausted. Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it’s about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.

Long-windedness, as Smiley knew, creates in those who must put up with it an almost unbearable urge to speak. If they do not interrupt directly, they at least counter with pent-up energy;

But his smile went with him everywhere. The typists declared that he slept in it, and hand-washed it at weekends.

Since girlhood, nothing seemed to have happened to her face beyond a steady fading of its hopes.

In this life you can give yourself or withhold yourself as you please, my dear. But never lend yourself. That way you’re worse than a spy.’”

As they sank into the city, the harbour lay like a perfect mirror at the centre of the jewel box.

footing; it is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

In the breaking of tragic news there is no transition. One minute a concept stands, the next it lies smashed, and for those affected the world has altered irrevocably.

Somewhere among all her imitations, he reckoned, there was a lost original, and he definitely intended to find it. The

It’s his Karla expression, Guillam decided; the one that comes over him when he looks at the photograph. He catches sight of it, it surprises him, and for a while he seems to study its contours, its blurred and sightless gaze. Then the light slowly goes out of his eyes, and somehow the hope as well, and you feel he’s looking inward, in alarm.

One day, thought Guillam, as he continued listening, one of two things will happen to George. He’ll cease to care or the paradox will kill him. If he ceases to care, he’ll be half the operator he is. If he doesn’t, that little chest will blow up from the struggle of trying to find the explanation for what we do. Smiley

why didn’t George just do the job and shut up instead of taking his faith out and polishing it in public till the flaws showed?