"Tinker Tailor Solider Spy" [.]

[fiefoe]

More greyness, some clarity:

• 'I like you to have doubts,’ he said. ‘It tells me where you stand. But don’t make a cult of them or you’ll be a bore.’
• “The rumour is as precise as that?” Smiley enquired. “And it goes that far down the line? Even to Tarr?”
• There was an interplay which could no longer be denied; that Merlin’s proverbial versatility allowed him to function as Karla’s instrument as well as Alleline’s.   <> And that at the heart of this plot lay a device so simple that it left him genuinely elated by its symmetry. It had even a physical presence.
• "As a Russian, one would give almost anything to the English if . . . well, if one could buy the Americans in return.”
• “Straight, too, believe it or not,” Sam added with no change to his expression. “We get all the help we need from the arithmetic.”
• "Also mainly dead. That’s damn big price, George”—holding the clean fingers close to Smiley’s face—“that’s damn big price for one Englishman with bullet-hole.”
• ...running, because the warm did him wonders while it lasted, and rhythm soothed his vigilance.
• For a moment Smiley was back in occupied Germany, in his own time as a field agent, living with terror in his mouth, naked to every stranger’s glance.
• He took a pull of vodka and thought of Tarr and Irina drinking on their hilltop in Hong Kong. It must be a habit of the trade, he decided: we talk better when there’s a view.
• The describing of pain was to Jim an indulgence to be dispensed with.
• It wasn’t that Jim broke exactly; he just ran out of invention. He couldn’t think up any more stories. The truths that he had locked away so deeply were the only things that suggested themselves.
• Testify did something else, too. It revealed to the Russians—through you, actually—the exact reach of Control’s suspicions.
• “I think that’s always been a point the Russians accept,” said Lacon. “After all, if you make your enemy look a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.”

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