The Honourable Schoolboy

Highlights

Page 7

But all he saw today was a smug, rich British rock run by a bunch of plum-throated traders whose horizons went no further than their belly-lines.

Page 22

Ever heard of a spookhouse without a wireless aerial? Might as well have a cathouse without a piano.’

Page 24

There had been times, experiencing those things, when he longed for the leisure to recover his power of disgust. If nightmares were necessary in order to restore him to the ranks of normal men and women, then he could embrace them with gratitude. But not in the worst of his nightmares had it occurred to him that having written the war, he might not be able to write the peace.

Page 30

Renting a cottage in the New Territories, he announced that he proposed to expire under a slanteye heaven.

Note: Wat

Page 69

That was the team: the Group of Five. In time it expanded, but to start with these five alone made up the famous cadre, and afterwards, to have been one of them, said di Salis, was ‘like holding a Communist Party card with a single-figure membership number’.

Page 69

First, Smiley reviewed the wreck, and that took some while, in the way that sacking a city takes some while,

Note: Lovely words

Page 72

‘George, I told those guys!’ he yelled, so loud that the telephone line seemed an unnecessary extravagance, ‘I told them: “The Circus will deliver.” Did they believe me? Did they hell!’

Note: Lmao

Page 74

Connie was a huge, crippled, cunning woman, a don’s daughter, a don’s sister, herself some sort of academic, and known to the older hands as Mother Russia.

Page 82

Still stooped over the papers, Smiley said: ‘Now can we just wander over the course here a little, Sam. There’s some discrepancy on the filing side, and I’d like to get your part of the record straight.’ ‘Sure,’ said Sam again and drew comfortably on his brown cigarette. He was watching Smiley’s hands, and occasionally, with studied idleness, his eyes – though never for too long. Whereas Smiley, for his part, fought only to keep his mind open to the devious options of a fieldman’s life. Sam might easily be defending something quite irrelevant. He had fiddled a little bit on his expenses, for example, and was afraid he’d been caught out. He had fabricated his report rather than go out and risk his neck: Sam was of an age, after all, where a fieldman looks first to his own skin. Or it was the opposite situation: Sam had ranged a little wider in his enquiries than Head Office had sanctioned. Hard pressed, he had gone to the pedlars rather than file a nil return. He had fixed himself a side-deal with the local Cousins. Or the local security services had blackmailed him – in Sarratt jargon, the angels had put a burn on him – and he had played the case both ways in order to survive and smile and keep his Circus pension. To read Sam’s moves, Smiley knew that he must stay alert to these and countless other options. A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world. So, as Smiley proposed, they wandered.

Page 87

‘Our own?’ ‘Three years at the mast,’ said Sam. ‘And good,’ added the fieldman in him, for whom all his geese are swans.

Page 88

Smiley’s ears were so sharp at that moment that he could have heard a leaf fall; but what he heard, metaphorically, was the sound of barriers being erected, and he knew at once, from the cadence, from the tightening of the voice, from the tiny facial and physical things which made up an exaggerated show of throwaway, that he was closing on the heart of Sam’s defences. So in his mind he put in a marker, deciding to remain with the micky-mouse aviation company for a while.

Page 135

‘A lot of people haven’t these days. The will. Specially in England. A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they’re nowhere. No battle was ever won by spectators, was it?

Page 141

But hatred was really not an emotion which he could sustain for any length of time, unless it was the obverse side of love.

Page 150

But paradoxically, though this morning he zealously went through the steps, another side of him knew he was wasting his time: knew that in the East a roundeye could live all his life in the same block and never have the smallest notion of the secret tic-tac on his doorstep. At every corner of each teeming street he entered, men waited, lounged and watched, strenuously employed in doing nothing.

Page 155

Before the fall, they’d have posted babysitters ahead of him – even someone inside the bank – just to watch for rain. They’d have had a reception team to skim the take almost before he left the building, and an escape car in case he had to slip away in his socks. And in London – he thought sweetly, talking himself down – they’d have had dear old Bill Haydon – wouldn’t they? – passing it all to the Russians, bless him.

Page 236

‘Oh, I think my point is made, thank you,’ said Smiley politely. ‘Really it’s a very simple one. Assuming we don’t proceed, which Lacon tells me is the balance of probability today, what am I to do? Throw the intelligence on the scrapheap? Or pass it to our allies under the existing barter arrangements?’ ‘Allies,’ Wilbraham exclaimed bitterly. ‘Allies? You’re putting a pistol at our heads, man!’ Smiley’s iron reply was all the more startling for the passivity which had preceded it. ‘I have a standing instruction from this committee to repair our American liaison. It is written into my charter, by yourselves, that I am to do everything possible to nurture the special relationship and revive the spirit of mutual confidence which existed before – Haydon. “To get us back to the top table,” you said …’ He was looking directly at Enderby.

Page 237

‘Ko read law in London,’

Note: I wonder why you read law in Britain but study law elsewhere

Page 245

‘We colonise them, your Graces, we corrupt them, we exploit them, we bomb them, sack their cities, ignore their culture and confound them with the infinite variety of our religious sects. We are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils as well – the stink of the roundeye is abhorrent to them and we’re too thick even to know it. Yet when we have done our worst, and more than our worst, my sons, we have barely scratched the surface of the Asian smile.’

Page 274

Longwindedness, as Smiley knew, creates in those who must put up with it an almost unbearable urge to speak.

Page 282

Did Karla have to scheme in committees? Fight cabals, deceive the stupid, flatter the clever, look in distorting mirrors of the Peter Worthington variety, all in order to do the job?

Page 319

She’d been watching, had Daisy. Enjoying it. I could see it in her eyes. She was one of them, at heart. Happy. “Daisy,” I said. “Pack your things and go. In this life you can give yourself or withhold yourself as you please, my dear. But never lend yourself. That way you’re worse than a spy.”’

Page 329

‘It’s the Cousins,’ Guillam said gently. ‘About Brother Ricardo, your favourite pilot. They want to meet with you at the Annexe as soon as possible. I’m to ring back by yesterday.’ ‘They want what?’ ‘To meet you. But they use the preposition.’ ‘Do they? Do they really? Good Lord. I suppose it’s the German influence. Or it is old English? Meet with. Well I must say.’ And he lumbered off to his bathroom to shave.

Page 356

After his success in the aircraft industry, Toby Esterhase was reassigned to the liquor trade and flew to the Western Isles of Scotland, under the guise of a Value Added Tax inspector, where he spent three days making a spot check of the books of a house of whisky distillers who specialised in the forward selling of unmatured kegs. He returned – to quote Connie – leering like a successful bigamist.

Note: LMAO

Page 391

it is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume they have no counterparts.

Page 397

“Spy on your friends today, they’re certain to be your enemies tomorrow,” he told them. Oldest dictum in the trade, Karla’s favourite. When he was given his job back he practically nailed it up on the door in Dzerzhinsky Square.

Page 472

The Reverend Ricardo’s lifelong Sancho Panza, your Grace, Craw had said,

Page 529

there were painfully-worked oil paintings of nude Thai girls, drawn with the sort of erotic inaccuracy that usually comes with too little access to the subject.

Page 593

Smiley himself, in a disastrous off-the-record chat to senior officers, had put the names to his dilemma, and Guillam, with some embarrassment, recalled them to this day. To be inhuman in defence of our humanity, he had said, harsh in defence of compassion. To be single-minded in defence of our disparity. They had filed out in a veritable ferment of protest. Why didn’t George just do the job and shut up instead of taking his faith out and polishing it in public till the flaws showed?

---