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Extract

‘Writers often draw on real life experience but because le Carré's experience was inside a world that was secret - and much more secret in his time than today - it is particularly hard to know where fact ends and fiction begins, creating a mystery whose value he understood.’

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"To be above the fray,” Pym wrote to himself on a separate sheet of paper. “A writer is King. He should look down with love upon his subject, even when the subject is himself.”

[...]

To be king, he repeated to himself. To look with favour on this child that was myself. To love his defects and his strivings, and pity his simplicity.

A Perfect Spy (John le Carré)

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Sometimes I remember Mary Pym commenting on Pym’s tendency to tear down his friends in private, and how really it’s just proof of how much he likes them because look at what he says about Grant! And God knows that Lederer & Pym are as close as anything! But actually they really are both 🔪🔪🔪

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tinker tailor

been seeing this movie again, again, again in various kinds of post work funk, to the point that I’ve washed the feeling out of it. but I think I understand some things better:

1. the fact that the film adaptation made ricki tarr into a sex icon rather than a tool and brute changed something basic about the story: it forces you to accept the way tarr conflates his “love” for irina (which you can’t take seriously in the book) with his hunger for her secret. the love interest is the same as the target, she is what she knows– the secret is taken for selfhood.

Keep reading

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“Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.”

— The Honourable Schoolboy, John le Carré

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John le Carré’s classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge and have earned him – and his hero, British Secret Service agent George Smiley – unprecedented worldwide acclaim.

A modern masterpiece in which le Carré expertly creates a total vision of a secret world, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy begins George Smiley’s chess match of wills and wits with Karla, his Soviet counterpart.

It is now beyond doubt that a mole, implanted decades ago by Moscow Centre, has burrowed his way into the highest echelons of British Intelligence. His treachery has already blown some of its most vital operations and its best networks. It is clear that the double agent is one of its own kind. But which one? George Smiley is assigned to identify him. And once identified, the traitor must be destroyed.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

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“Guillam drove languidly but fast. Smells of autumn filled the air. A full moon was shining. Strands of mist hung over open fields and the cold was irresistible. Smiley wondered how old Guillam was and guessed forty, but in that light he could have been an undergraduate sculling on the river. He moved the gear lever with a long flowing movement as if he were passing it through water. In any case, Smiley thought irritably, the car was far too young for Guillam.”

—

John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (via cinemaocd)

#god this scene is so romantic

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The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) Martin Ritt

April 28th 2022

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John Le Carré was really ahead of the curve on the whole "my brother in Christ" meme.

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“He imagined also that, like himself, Jim had had a great attachment that had failed him and that he longed to replace. But here Bill Roach’s speculation met a dead end: he had no idea how adults loved each other.”

— Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carré

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“Pym still has more than a quarter of a century in which to serve his two houses according to the best standards of his omnivorous loyalty. The trained, married, case-hardened, elderly adolescent has still to become a man, though who will ever break the genetic code of when a middle-class Englishman’s adolescence ends and his manhood takes over?”

— A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre

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Stellan Skarsgård as Dima in OUR KIND OF TRAITOR (2016) DIR. SUSANNA WHITE

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I, too, would have killed to see Karla and Smiley talk post SP. LET US BE A FLY ON THE WALL, MR. LE CARRE. - also. To me, Karla's interference with Smiley's marriage strikes me as less of a cold and calculating chess move and more - personal. Like, maybe it does interfere with Smiley's ability to think straight, but I can't help but feel that Karla just gets a kick out of inserting himself into Smiley's personal life like that. He likes knowing that his influence is everywhere in S's life

I think it was definitely a double whammy. Smiley exposed this weakness when he and Karla met for the first time; Smiley admits that in trying to undo Karla and find his weaknesses, he accidentally exposed too many of his own. Karla took the lighter as a subtle reminder of that -- that he knew about Smiley, and that one day he was absolutely going to use it against him.

how brilliant, then, that Smiley knew this about their dynamic, and was probably somewhat on guard regarding what this attack might be, and the form it would take -- but then he still missed it. even with the evidence right in front of his face, he didn't connect the dots, because why would he? the plan was so intricate, and both Bill and Ann had a reputation for fooling around with whoever they liked; it seemed like an inevitability for Smiley, I'm sure. by this point he was used to his wife's infidelity, and he knew well Bill's reputation. it seemed cruel, and like being kicked while he was down, but Smiley wasn't so unused to it that he would think it was suspect. it was an absolutely perfect exploitation of all of their characters: Bill and Ann for both being promiscuous, and Smiley because he would just accept his bad luck as always. there was no need for Smiley to think "but why Bill? why Ann? why now?"

Karla definitely got a kick out of this -- this hiding in plain sight. it's the exact kind of plan that Karla loves and that he excels in. his plans are so subtle and so intricate that it's damn near impossible to unravel them, and if one is eventually unravelled, then the unraveller often finds out that things went deeper than he ever could have realised, and -- perhaps most cruelly -- only luck or carelessness on somebody else's part allowed him to find the plan out. Karla's plans are watertight, but all plans are only as good as the people involved with them. rather than this being a frustration for Karla, I think he would enjoy knowing that Smiley was aware of this, too. Karla is everywhere, and could potentially be everywhere, at any time. this is a place where he beats Smiley hands down, and I think this is one advantage he loves to flaunt.

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smiley’s people (1982) opening credits

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Three Adrians

Three spies (Jack Brotherhood, Ned and Hector Meredith) from three different novels by John le Carré (A Perfect Spy, The Secret Pilgrim and Our Kind of Traitor), all having a troubled relationship with a son named Adrian:

And there was a useless son who scratched a living on the stage and if Brotherhood was feeling charitable towards him, which oddly enough these days he sometimes was, and if he could stomach the squalor and the smell of pot, which he sometimes could, he would have been welcome enough to the heap of greasy coverlets that Adrian called his spare bed. (A Perfect Spy)

Then I realised I had happened upon it at a period when my relationship with my son Adrian had hit a low point. He was talking of not bothering with university, and getting himself a well-paid job instead. I mistook his restlessness for materialism and his dreams of independence for laziness, and one night I lost my temper and insulted him, and was duly ashamed of myself for weeks thereafter. (The Secret Pilgrim)

Others with rather more hard evidence to go on pointed at the personal tragedy that had befallen Hector shortly before his departure from the Service when his wayward only son Adrian, not for the first time, had crashed a stolen car at high speed while under the influence of class-A drugs. (Our Kind of Traitor)

Troubled relationship with a son called Adrian - this could be an entry in the le Carré tropes bingo card 😂

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The Little Drummer Girl -  Episode #1.1

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“Home's where you go when you run out of homes.”

–John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy