The Honourable Schoolboy

by John Le Carré

‘Are you English?’ she asked on the way. ‘Pips, core, the lot,’

‘But within these walls, gentlemen,’ pipes the Doc, whose awareness of the female sex is inconsistent,

For the English, pornography printed in Brussels. For the French, row after row of tattered classics: Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hugo.

In the beginning was the deed, Smiley liked to say to him, in his failed-priest mood, quoting from one of his German poets. For Jerry, that simple maxim had become a pillar of his uncomplicated philosophy. What a man thinks is his own business. What matters is what he does.