Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

You could meet him any day on the Underground. Hundreds of him. Mr. George Smiley, small, podgy, and at best middle-aged, is one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth. He is also a senior British intelligence officer, as devastating as he is self-effacing. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy we meet him in short-lived retirement, deserted by his beautiful wife, wrestling with idleness and disillusionment. And haunted by the secret fear which follows every professional to his grave: namely that one day, out of a past so complex that he himself could not remember all the enemies he might have made, one of them would find him and demand a reckoning.