Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Highlights

Page 11

He blamed himself very much for these shortcomings but most of all he blamed himself for the break-up of his parents’ marriage, which he should have seen coming and taken steps to prevent. He even wondered whether he was more directly responsible, whether for instance he was abnormally wicked or divisive or slothful, and that his bad character had wrought the rift.

Page 25

‘That’s ridiculous! That’s the most idiotic story I ever heard! Control is dead. He died of a heart attack after a long illness. Besides he hated South Africa. He hated everywhere except Surrey, the Circus and Lord’s Cricket Ground. Really, Roddy, you mustn’t tell stories like that.’

Page 107

Run you: Tiny Toby spoke no known language perfectly, but he spoke them all. In Switzerland Guillam had heard his French and it had a German accent; his German had a Slav accent and his English was full of stray flaws and stops and false vowel sounds.

Page 243

That in the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery?

Page 264

Someone was doing a special job for him, he said. It was of great importance to the Service. He kept saying that: to the Service. Not Whitehall or sterling or the price of fish, but us.

Page 287

‘Too much wampum not good for braves,’ Jerry intoned solemnly. For years they had had this Red Indian joke running, Smiley remembered with a sinking heart. ‘How,’ said Smiley. ‘How,’ said Jerry, and they drank.

Page 288

To himself, saying this, Smiley sounded like Lacon. But the only way to talk to Jerry was to talk like Jerry’s newspaper: short sentences; facile opinions.

Page 351

‘I mean to say, just because the Russians know our secrets doesn’t mean everyone else has to. We got plenty of other fish to fry apart from them, don’t we? What about all the black men: are they going to be reading the gory details in the Wallah-Wallah News in a week’s time?’

Page 369

Moscow Centre must be allowed to think she has an important Circus source; Whitehall on no account must get wind of the same notion. Take it to its logical conclusion and Gerald would have us strangling our own children in their beds. It would be beautiful in another context,’

Page 394

He knew, of course. He had always known it was Bill. Just as Control had known, and Lacon in Mendel’s house. Just as Connie and Jim had known, and Alleline and Esterhase, all of them had tacitly shared that unexpressed half-knowledge which like an illness they hoped would go away if it was never owned to, never diagnosed. And Ann? Did Ann know? Was that the shadow that fell over them that day on the Cornish cliffs? 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.

Page 407

At Oxford, he said, he was genuinely of the right, and in the war, it scarcely mattered where one stood as long as one was fighting the Germans. For a while, after forty-five, he said, he had remained content with Britain’s part in the world, till gradually it dawned on him just how trivial this was. How and when was a mystery. In the historical mayhem of his own lifetime he could point to no one occasion: simply he knew that if England were out of the game, the price of fish would not be altered by a farthing. He had often wondered which side he would be on if the test ever came; after prolonged reflection he had finally to admit that if either monolith had to win the day, he would prefer it to be the East. ‘It’s an aesthetic judgment as much as anything,’ he explained, looking up. ‘Partly a moral one, of course.’ ‘Of course,’ said Smiley politely.

Page 420

Smiley shrugged it all aside, distrustful as ever of the standard shapes of human motive, and settled instead for a picture of one of those wooden Russian dolls that open up, revealing one person inside the other, and another inside him. Of all men living, only Karla had seen the last little doll inside Bill Haydon.

---