Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

by John Le Carré

‘Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.

Don’t you think it’s time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?

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

This man was my friend and Ann’s lover, Jim’s friend and for all I know Jim’s lover too; it was the treason, not the man, that belonged to the public domain.

Was not Bill also betrayed? Connie’s lament rang in his ears: ‘Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves … You’re the last, George, you and Bill.’ He saw with painful clarity an ambitious man born to the big canvas, brought up to rule, divide and conquer, whose visions and vanities all were fixed, like Percy’s, upon the world’s game; for whom the reality was a poor island with scarcely a voice that would carry across the water. Thus Smiley felt not only disgust; but, despite all that the moment meant to him, a surge of resentment against the institutions he was supposed to be protecting: ‘The social contract cuts both ways, you know,’ said Lacon.

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.