Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: A George Smiley Novel (George Smiley Novels Book 5)

Both services would have done much less damage to their countries, moral and financial, if they had simply been disbanded.

Steeple Aston—that was a place. He would set up as a mild eccentric, discursive, withdrawn, but possessing one or two lovable habits such as muttering to himself as he bumbled along pavements. Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn’t these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forwar

But Smiley had a second reason, which was fear, the secret fear that follows every professional to his grave. Namely, that one day, out of a past so complex that he himself could not remember all the enemies he might have made, one of them would find him and demand the reckoning.

Not of course that she knew anything, but what woman was ever stopped by a want of information? She felt. And despised him for not acting in accordance with her feelings.

For a space, that was how Smiley stood: a fat, barefooted spy, as Ann would say, deceived in love and impotent in hate, clutching a gun in one hand, a bit of string in the other, as he waited in the darkness. Then, gun still in hand, he tiptoed backward as far as the window, from which he signalled five short flashes in quick succession. Having wai

“I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn’t. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one’s aims are, that’s the trouble, specially if you’re British. We can’t expect you people to determine our policy for us, can we? We can only ask you to further it. Corre

“There won’t be much, I’m sure,” Smiley had said, as if thinner files were easier. “But there ought to be something, if only for appearances.” That was another thing about him that Guillam didn’t like just then: he spoke as if you followed his reasoning, as if you were inside his mind all the time.

“I sometimes think I safeguard your opinion of him. Is that possible? That I somehow keep the two of you together. Is that possible?” “It’s possible.” He added, “Yes, I suppose I’m dependent on him, too, in a way.”

Smiley also knew, or thought he knew—the idea came to him now as a mild enlightenment—that Bill in turn was also very little by himself: that while his admirers (Bland, Prideaux, Alleline, Esterhase, and all the rest of the supporters’ club) might find in him completeness, Bill’s real trick was to use them, to live through them to complete himself,