Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (The Karla Trilogy, #1)

by John Le Carré

“Best place in the whole damn world!” he bellowed once. “Know why? Know why, toad?” Spikely did not, so Jim seized a crayon and drew a globe. To the west, America, he said, full of greedy fools fouling up their inheritance. To the east, China-Russia; he drew no distinction: boiler suits, prison camps, and a damn long march to nowhere. In the middle . . .

Bogus Oxford men he could deal with, just as in his time he had known classics masters who had no Greek and parsons who had no divinity. Such men, confronted with proof of their deception, broke down and wept and left, or stayed on half-pay. But men who withheld genuine accomplishment—these were a breed he had not met but he knew already that he did not like them.

you might as well bring in the army to investigate the navy!” “That’s no comparison at all,” Smiley objected. But Lacon as a good civil servant had his second metaphor ready: “Very well, the Minister would rather live with a damp roof than see his castle pulled down by outsiders.

“It is sheer vanity to believe that one fat middle-aged spy is the only person capable of holding the world together,” he would tell himself.

“There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing,” Ann liked to say—it was a favourite apologia, indeed, for many of her misdemeanours—“There is only one reason for doing something. And that’s because you want to.” Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of.

creamy head vanish between his feet. Mary called him strawberry and vanilla, he remembered: red face, white hair, and mushy.

At the same moment, he heard what sounded like a single note played on a flute: it came from a car, most likely, braking in the street outside; or the wheel of a file trolley squeaking on linoleum.

Don’t look that way, it’s all neon lights and Sodom. Kiss me. All over the world, beastly people are making our time into nothing;

It was detailed but it dealt with matters that Smiley did not understand even at a distance: shore-to-sea strike power, radio activation of enemy alert procedures, the higher mathematics of the balance of terror. If

As a good Socialist, I’m going for the money. As a good capitalist, I’m sticking with the revolution, because if you can’t beat it spy on it. Don’t look like that, George. It’s the name of the game these days: you scratch my conscience, I’ll drive your Jag, right?”

Did he not believe, for example, that the political generality was meaningless? That only the particular in life had value for him now? That in the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery?

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

he wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion;