![]() ![]() ![]() David Cornwell, an ex-spook who worked under diplomatic cover in Bonn in the late 1950s and early 1960s - at first relocated the offices of MI6 from Mayfair across central London to Cambridge Circus in order to put Smiley closer to the booksellers off Charing Cross Road. It’s always seemed to me that le Carré - a.k.a. Since John le Carré introduced him in his first novel, Call for the Dead, Smiley has ever been hopping between his preferred haunts on dry land - rare bookstores and university libraries, where he conducts his amateur studies in early modern German literature - and the murky waters of counterespionage for the British intelligence service. The amphibian metaphor has fit Smiley for 56 years. In his wife’s eyes, he was “breathtakingly ordinary”: “Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.” For a recurring hero who would go on to become an iconic character on the page and onscreen, George Smiley received a harsh introduction. ![]()
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