It was the other side of Haydon’s nature, by contrast, that as a colleague he had found easier to respect: the slow-burning skills of the natural agent runner; his rare sense of balance in the playing back of double agents and the mounting of deception operations; his art of fostering affection, even love, though it ran against the grain of other l

Her formless white face took on the grandmother’s glow of enchanted reminiscence. Her memory was as compendious as her body and surely she loved it more, for she had put everything aside to listen to it: her drink, her cigarette, even for a while Smiley’s passive hand.

“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.”

“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.

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.

“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

“I didn’t know you spoke Russian,” said Smiley—a comment lost to everyone but Tarr, who at once grinned. “Ah, now, a man needs a qualification in this profession, Mr. Smiley,” he explained as he separated the pages. “I may not have been too great at law but a further language can be decisive. You know what the poets say, I expect?” He looked up fro

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

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