Word: circusing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...relationship thicker then blood? Smiley backtracks through archives and files to find names, places, references once suppressed by Haydon. Midway through the paper chase, coherence emerges. A devious plan unfolds, vouchsafed piecemeal to the anxious reader. The opening moves are made with Jerry Westerby, an aristocratic refugee from occasional Circus assignments now living in the Tuscany hills, where his bookish habits have earned him the sobriquet "the Schoolboy." Westerby carries the spy's classic cards of identity: robust health, womanizing instincts and moral numbness. With words that could have been set to music by Sir Edward Elgar, Smiley reminds...
...daydreamy beautiful loser, "punchball" for many lovers, whose flaws prove even more compelling than her easy virtue: "not just the claw marks on her chin, but her lines of travel, and of strain ... honourable scars from all the battles against her bad luck and her bad judgement." Connie Sachs, Circus Sovietologist beyond compare, "a huge, crippled cunning woman, known to the older hands as Mother Russia." Fawn, Smiley's recessive factotum and "scalp hunter"?professional killer; Craw, an old China hand of archbishoprical speech and mien, shamelessly based on the form and choler of Sunday Times Correspondent Richard Hughes...
...made good that promise with George Smiley, who was a walk-on in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. But these Circus clowns and aerialists will no longer live on promises: in The Honourable Schoolboy they jostle and clamor for the reader's attention. Fieldmen, office workers, a parade of journalists and reprobates (The Honourable Schoolboy finds the two synonymous), half-castes and Orientals give the book the richness of a Victorian novel of manners...
Burrower: Circus research specialist...
...Circus: London headquarters of the British Secret Service...