Thus we do disagreeable things, but we are defensive. That, I think, is still fair. We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night. Is tha...
There was a fellow called Smiley married Ann Sercomb, Lord Sawley’s cousin. Damned pretty girl, Ann was, and went and married this fellow. Some funny little beggar in the Civil Service with an OBE and...
The snow is still falling and the worst man in the world is drawn towards it like a man who is contemplating his childhood in the dancing flakes.
The ground on which you once stood is cut away. You have become a citizen of No Man’s Land. I send you my greetings.-- the closing lines of Smiley's letter to Karla persuading him to defect.
Some fieldmen, and particularly the clever ones, take a perverse pride in not knowing the whole picture. Their art consists in the deft handling of loose ends, and stops there stubbornly.
Smiley presented an odd figure to his fellow passengers – a little fat man, rather gloomy, suddenly smiling, ordering a drink. The young, fair-haired man beside him examined him closely out of the cor...
Probably she said yes. Afterwards she was not sure. She saw his scared gaze lift and stare at the approaching bus. She saw an indecision near to panic seize him, and it occurred to her – which in the...
Look, we are getting to be old men, and we've spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems... Don't you think it's time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side a...
It is a prison for those who fail to recognize socialist reality; for those who think they have the right to err; for those who slow down the march. Traitors, she concluded briefly. But what have they...
I wished I could make them throw everything over for a flawed and impossible passion, only to see the objective it turn against them, proving there is no reward for love except the experience of lovin...
Enemies I do not fear, Villem. But friends I fear greatly.’ Smiley
Alec, what do you believe in? Don't laugh-tell me.' She waited and at last he said:'I believe an eleven bus will take me to Hammersmith. I don't believe it's driven by Father Christmas.
What is conviction? How do we identify it? How can we know that we should be guided by it? Is it to be found in the heart, or in the intellect? And what if it is only to be found in the one and not th...
Si les Américains s'étaient donné autant de mal pour le désarmement que pour envoyer un pauvre type sur la lune, ou coller des rayures roses dans le dentifrice, on l'aurait depuis longtemps, le désarm...
You can’t eat politics, you can’t sell them, and you can’t sleep with them,’ Drake liked to say. So you might as well make money out of them.
Why are Scots so attracted to the secret world? Smiley wondered, not for the first time in his career. Ships’ engineers, Colonial administrators, spies. . . . Their heretical Scottish history drew the...
We were wondering, you see,’ he said in a faraway voice, ‘whether you’d ever considered signing up with us on a more regular basis? People who have worked on the outside for us don’t always fit well o...
The bad dream turned out to be one that a lot of people in the world were sharing, since it asked the same old question that we are asking ourselves fifty years later: how far can we go in the rightfu...
Smiley. Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad. Sawley, in fact, declared at t...
Outside the school's walls the Swinging Sixties are in full cry, but inside them the band of Empire plays on. Twice-daily chapel services praise the school's war dead to the detriment of its living, v...