The Honourable Schoolboy Quotes

A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.

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

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

Let's die of it before we're too old.

A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.

What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?

Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.

Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were volcanoes.

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.

Sometimes you do it to save face, thought Jerry, other times you just do it because you haven't done your job unless you've scared yourself to death. Other times again, you go in order to remind yourself that survival is a fluke. But mostly you go because the others go; for machismo; and because in order to belong you must share.

Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it’s about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.

His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were.

In the breaking of tragic news there is no transition. One minute a concept stands; the next it lies smashed, and for those affected the world has altered irrevocably

We colonise them, Your Graces, we corrupt them, we exploit them, we bomb them, sack their cities, ignore their culture, and confound them with the infinite variety of our religious sects. We are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils as well—the stink of the round-eye is abhorrent to them and we’re too thick even to know it. Yet when we have done our worst, and more than our worst, my sons, we have barely scratched the surface of the Asian smile.” Other

Some fieldmen, and particularly the clever ones, take a perverse pride in not knowing the whole picture. Their art consists in the deft handling of loose ends, and stops there stubbornly.

The sand of the desert is sodden red, -- Red with the wreck of a square that broke; -- The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead, And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. The river of death has brimmed his banks, And England's far, and Honour a name, But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks: 'Play up! play up! and play the game!

I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.   —W. H. AUDEN

To be inhuman in defence of our humanity . . . harsh in defence of compassion. To be single-minded in defence of our disparity.

(George Smiley) - I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest toward my country's goal. The enemy in those days was someone we could point at and read about in the papers. Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole life in terms of conspiracy (p. 588).

BUSY old fool, unruly Sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains, call on us? Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run? Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide Late school-boys and sour prentices, Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride, Call country ants to harvest offices ; Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time. Thy beams so reverend, and strong Why shouldst thou think ? I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink, But that I would not lose her sight so long. If her eyes have not blinded thine, Look, and to-morrow late tell me, Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me. Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday, And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay." She's all states, and all princes I ; Nothing else is ; Princes do but play us ; compared to this, All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy. Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we, In that the world's contracted thus ; Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be To warm the world, that's done in warming us. Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ; This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

If you buy people,’ old Sambo used to say, ‘buy them thoroughly

But hatred was really not an emotion which he could sustain for any length of time, unless it was the obverse side of love.

But we progress, Your Graces. Inexorably we progress. Albeit at the blind man’s speed, as we tap-tap along in the dark.

Odd,” he remarked finally. “One has no sense of shock. Why is that, Peter? You know me. Why is it?

After a while, even the best stories grow cold.

Life’s byways, I always maintain, are even stranger than life’s highways

Since girlhood, nothing seemed to have happened to her face, beyond a steady fading of its hopes

I know what you mean. But I think it safer to stay with institutions, if you don’t mind. In that way we are spared the embarrassment of personalities. After all, that’s what institutions are for, isn’t it?

You said they were friends, Mr Worthington. Sometimes third parties become intermediaries in these affairs.’ On the word affair, he looked up and found himself staring directly into Peter Worthington’s honest, abject eyes: and for a moment the two masks slipped simultaneously. Was Smiley observing? Or was he being observed?

Some people are agents from birth, Monsignors -- he told them -- appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first, Your Eminences: 'Whether it's us, whether it's the opposition, or whether it's the bloody missionaries.

There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing,” Ann liked to say—it was a favourite apologia, indeed, for many of her misdemeanours—“There is only one reason for doing something. And that’s because you want to.” Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of.

Beyond the typhoon shelters, ships slid past them, lighted buildings on the march, and the junks hobbled in their wakes. Inland, the Island whined and clanged and throbbed, and the huge slums twinkled like jewel boxes opened by the deceptive beauty of the night. Presiding over them, glimpsed between the dipping finger of the masts, sat the black Peak, Victoria, her sodden face shrouded with moonlit skeins; the goddess, the freedom, the lure of all that wild striving in the valley. They

One more consideration also weighed with Smiley, though in his paper he is too gentlemanly to mention it. A lot of ghosts walked in those post-fall days, and one of them was a fear that, buried somewhere in the Circus, lay Bill Haydon's chosen successor: that Bill had brought him on, recruited and educated him against the very day when he himself, one way or another, would fade from the scene. Sam was originally a Haydon nominee. His later victimisation by Haydon could easily have been a put-up job. Who was to say, in that very jumpy atmosphere, that Sam Collins, manoeuvring for readmission, was not the heir elect to Haydon's treachery? For all these reasons George Smiley put on his raincoat and got himself out on the street. Willingly, no doubt - for at heart, he was still a case man. Even his detractors gave him that.

have

What are you doing in there, for Christ’s sake?’ Jerry yelled. ‘What goes on?’ Perhaps he’s having a pee, he thought absurdly. Slowly the door opened. Craw’s gravity was awesome. ‘They haven’t come out,’ said Jerry. He had the feeling of not reaching Craw at all. He was going to repeat himself in fact, loudly. He was going to dance about and make a damn scene. So that Craw’s answer, when it finally came, came just in time. ‘To the contrary, my son.’ The old boy took a step forward and Jerry could see the films now, hanging behind him like black wet worms from Craw’s little clothes line, pink pegs holding them in place. ‘To the contrary, sir,’ he said, ‘every frame is a bold and disturbing masterpiece.

His mind, as he sucked and spat, was fragmented by drink and mild concussion

recruited by Karla the Russian as a “mole” or “sleeper”—or, in English, agent of penetration

to dinner at the Governor’s, but his tai-tai wouldn’t let the chauffeur pick her up.

The usual snafu. Bad guys are too weak to take the towns, good guys are too crapped out to take the countryside and nobody wants to fight except the Coms. Students ready to set fire to the place soon as they’re no longer exempt from the war, food riots any day now, corruption like there was no tomorrow, no one can live on his salary, fortunes being made and the place bleeding to death. Palace is unreal and the Embassy is a nut-house, more spooks than straight guys and all pretending they’ve got a secret. Want more?

Pity you ran out of steam,’ Ming bawled, to Jerry and anyone else who cared to listen. ‘Nobody’s brought off the eastern novel recently, my view. Greene managed it, if you can take Greene, which I can’t, too much popery. Malraux if you like philosophy, which I don’t. Maugham you can have, and before that it’s back to Conrad. Cheers. Mind my saying something?’ Jerry filled Ming’s glass. ‘Go easy on the Hemingway stuff. All that grace under pressure, love with your balls shot off. They don’t like it, my view. It’s been said.

Guillam was exhausted. Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it's about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.

affectation of assuming everything was alive and potentially recalcitrant,

Essere inumani in difesa della nostra umanità, spietati in difesa della compassione. Essere monotoni in difesa della nostra varietà.

You can’t eat politics, you can’t sell them, and you can’t sleep with them,’ Drake liked to say. So you might as well make money out of them.

Dealing with beautiful women, Your Grace, Craw had warned, is like dealing with known criminals, and the lady you are about to solicit undoubtedly falls within that category.

Close to-night—     Ten to make and the match to win— A bumping pitch and a blinding light,     An hour to play and the last man in. And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,     Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame, But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote—     “Play up! play up! and play the game!”   The sand of the desert is sodden red,—     Red with the wreck of a square that broke;— The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,     And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. The river of death has brimmed his banks,     And England’s far, and Honour a name, But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:     “Play up! play up! and play the game!

The café was modern Swiss antique.

I refuse to bequeath my life’s work to a parade horse. I’m too vain to be flattered, too old to be ambitious, and I’m ugly as a crab. Percy’s quite the other way and there are enough witty men in Whitehall to prefer his sort to mine.

Vitaï Lampada There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night — Ten to make and the match to win — A bumping pitch and a blinding light, An hour to play and the last man in. And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat, Or the selfish hope of a season's fame, But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote "Play up! play up! and play the game!" The sand of the desert is sodden red, — Red with the wreck of a square that broke; — The Gatling's jammed and the colonel dead, And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. The river of death has brimmed his banks, And England's far, and Honour a name, But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks, "Play up! play up! and play the game!" This is the word that year by year While in her place the School is set Every one of her sons must hear, And none that hears it dare forget. This they all with a joyful mind Bear through life like a torch in flame, And falling fling to the host behind — "Play up! play up! and play the game!

In a mad world you keep the fiction going, he thought; stick to it till the bitter end and leave the first bite to him.

sullen and bejewelled.

We’re fighting for the survival of Reasonable Man’?

And in his customary corner, the awesome Rocker, Superintendent of Police, ex-Palestine, ex-Kenya, ex-Malaya, ex-Fiji, an implacable warhorse with a beer, one set of slightly reddened knuckles, and a weekend copy of the South China Morning Post.

she smiled that brimming smile of hers

Happened before Bill had time to get his hoof on it,” she replied.

And good,” added the fieldman in him, for whom all his geese are swans.

We’ve got him, George, darling,” Connie kept saying under her breath. “Sure as boots we’ve got the beastly toad.

You alcoholic, dissolute, lecherous, libidinous . . .

She was a huge, crippled, cunning woman, a don’s daughter, a don’s sister, herself some sort of academic, and known to the older hands as Mother Russia.

Talking of others, old men talk about themselves, studying their image in vanished mirrors

He typed the eagle’s way, she told them later amid admiring laughter: much circling before he swooped.

Guillam was exhausted. Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it’s about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.

she was muttering, “There, you little devil,” and, “Now where did you get to, you wretch?” not to Smiley or Guillam, of course, but to the documents themselves, for Connie had the affectation of assuming everything was alive and potentially recalcitrant, whether it was Trot her dog or a chair that obstructed her passage, or Moscow Centre, or finally Karla himself.

Thirteen years ago the Soviet Union was still locked in the ice of a slothful and corrupt oligarchy, and the puritanically minded leaders of the new China had turned their backs on their old ally and mentor in contempt. Today it is the Soviet Union which is in the throes of redefining the great Proletarian Revolution, if there ever really was one, while the blood of heroic young Chinese men and women who asked peaceably for similar redefinition of their political identity lies thick on Tiananmen Square, however many times the Army’s water-cannons try to wash it away.

Why else might I pick up this book ten years from now? The answer is like a sad smile in my memory. For the vanished Cambodia. For the vanished Phnom Penh, the last of Joseph Conrad’s river ports to go to the devil. For the scent of cooking oil and night flowers and the clamour of the bullfrogs as we ate our ridiculously wonderful French-Khmer meals just a few miles from the predatory armies that were about to devastate the city. For the insinuating murmur of the street girls perched up in the backs of their cyclos, as they ticked past us in the hot dark. For the memory, in short, of the dying days of French colonialism, before the vengeance of the terrible Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge swept it all away for good or bad. As to Hong Kong—is that all history too? Even as I write, Mrs. Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary is in the Colony, bravely explaining why Britain can do nothing for a people she has dined off for a hundred and fifty years. Only betrayal, it seems, is timeless.

Guillam is tall and tough and graceful, and probationers awaiting first posting tend to look up to him as some sort of Greek god.

Craw was happy as the day is long, he reported; quite his former vile self, but a bit dazed to be bearded by Luke without warning. He had a friend with him, not a Chinese boy, but a visiting fireman whom he introduced as George: a podgy, ill-sighted little body in very round spectacles who had apparently dropped in unexpectedly. Aside, Craw explained to Luke that this George was a back-room boy on a British newspaper syndicate he used to work for in the dark ages. “Handles the geriatric side, Your Grace. Taking a swing through Asia.” Whoever he was, it was clear that Craw stood in awe of the podgy man, for he even called him “Your Holiness.

American intelligence agents generally, he said, and not just in Asia, were “hopping mad about lax security in the British organisations.” They were hopping highest about the recent discovery of a top Russian spy—he threw in the correct trade name of “mole”—inside the Circus’s London headquarters: a British traitor, whom they declined to name, but who, in the words of the senior prebends, had “compromised every Anglo-American clandestine operation worth a dime for the last twenty years.” Where was the mole now? the writer had asked his sources. To which, with undiminished spleen, they had replied: “Dead. In Russia. And hopefully both.

Connie Sachs has been doing some arithmetic on Karla’s handwriting in analogous cases,” Smiley announced. “Handwriting?” Lacon echoed, as if handwriting were a vice. “Tradecraft. Karla’s habits of technique. It seems that where it was operable, he ran moles and sound-thieves in tandem.” “Once more now, in English, George—do you mind?” Where circumstance allowed, said Smiley, Karla had backed up his agent operations with microphones. Though Smiley was satisfied that nothing had been said within the building which could compromise any “present plans,” as he called them, the implications were unsettling.

By the organic processes of a closed society, a new word was added to the jargon. The unmasking of Haydon now became the “fall,” and Circus history was divided into before the fall and after it. To Smiley’s comings and goings, the physical fall of the building itself—three-quarters empty and, since the visit of the ferrets, in a wrecked condition—lent a sombre sense of ruin which at low moments became symbolic to those who had to live with it.

Nevertheless, his peroration was a minor tour de force of destructive analysis. “So no illusions,” he ended tersely. “This service will never be the same again. It may be better, but it will be different.

The premise, said Smiley when they had resettled, was that Haydon had done nothing against the Circus that was not directed, and that the direction came from one man personally: Karla. The premise was that in briefing Haydon, Karla was exposing the gaps in Moscow Centre’s knowledge; that in ordering Haydon to suppress certain intelligence which came the Circus’s way, in ordering him to downgrade or distort it, to deride it, or even to deny it circulation altogether, Karla was indicating which secrets he did not want revealed.

That in the end analysis, it was not Haydon’s paperwork which had caused his downfall, not his meddling with reports, or his “losing” of inconvenient records. It was Haydon’s panic. It was Haydon’s spontaneous intervention in a field operation, where the threat to himself, or perhaps to another Karla agent, was suddenly so grave that his one hope was to suppress it despite the risk.

She was a huge, crippled, cunning woman, a don’s daughter, a don’s sister, herself some sort of academic, and known to the older hands as Mother Russia. The folklore said Control had recruited her over a rubber of bridge while she was still a débutante, on the night Neville Chamberlain promised “peace in our time.” When Haydon came to power in the slip-stream of his protector Alleline, one of his first and most prudent moves was to have Connie put out to grass.

That was the team: the group of five. In time it expanded, but to start with, these five alone made up the famous cadre, and to have been one of them, said di Salis afterwards, was “like holding a Communist Party card with a single-figure membership number.

That’s Karla, is it?” said Sam, studying the photograph. Smiley’s tone became at once donnish and vague. “Who? Ah, yes, yes it is. Not much of a likeness, I’m afraid, but the best we can do as yet.” They might have been admiring an early water-colour.

As she pulled them out, and smoothed the notes that she had pinned on them like markers in her paper-chase, she smiled that brimming smile of hers—Guillam again, for curiosity had obliged him to down tools and come and watch—and she was muttering, “There, you little devil,” and, “Now where did you get to, you wretch?” not to Smiley or Guillam, of course, but to the documents themselves, for Connie had the affectation of assuming everything was alive and potentially recalcitrant, whether it was Trot her dog or a chair that obstructed her passage, or Moscow Centre, or finally Karla himself.

Fieldmen have different ways of showing no emotion, and Sam’s was to smile, smoke slower, and fill his eyes with a dark glow of particular indulgence, fixing them intently on his partner in discussion.

At Cambridge, Sam had taken a dazzling first, thus confounding his tutors, who till then had dismissed him as a near idiot. He had done it, the dons afterwards told each other consolingly, entirely on memory. The more worldly tongues told a different tale, however. According to them, Sam had trailed a love affair with a plain girl at the Examination Schools, and obtained from her a preview of the papers.

They were, in all, five: Smiley himself; Peter Guillam his cupbearer; big, flowing Connie Sachs the Moscow-gazer; Fawn the dark-eyed factotum, who wore black gym shoes and manned the Russian-style copper samovar and gave out biscuits; and lastly Doc di Salis, known as “the Mad Jesuit,” the Circus’s head China-watcher. When God had finished making Connie Sachs, said the wags, He needed a rest, so He ran up Doc di Salis from the remnants.

Vous restez combien de temps, Monsieur?” the immigration officer enquired. “Toujours, sport,” said Jerry. “Long as you’ll have me. Longer.

In the breaking of tragic news there is no transition. One minute a concept stands, the next it lies smashed, and for those affected the world has altered irrevocably. As a cushion, however, Guillam had used official Circus stationery and the written word. By writing his message to Smiley in signal form, he hoped that the sight of it would prepare him in advance. Walking quietly to the desk, the form in his hand, he laid it on the glass sheet and waited.

Poor devil didn’t know enough, did he?” Connie mused, seemingly to herself. At first nobody took her up. Then Guillam did: what did she mean by that? “Frost had nothing to betray, darling,” she explained. “That’s the worst that can happen to anyone. What could he give them? One zealous journalist, name of Westerby. They had that already, little dears. So of course, they went on. And on.” She turned to Smiley’s direction. He was the only one who shared so much history with her. “We used to make it a rule—remember, George—when the boys went in? We always gave them something they could confess.

They had run in all directions, these shady night animals, down old paths and new paths and old paths grown over till they were rediscovered; and now at last, behind their twin leaders—Connie Sachs alias Mother Russia, and di Salis alias the Doc—they crammed themselves, all twelve of them, into the very throne-room itself, under Karla’s portrait, in an obedient half-circle round their chief, Bolshies and yellow perils together. A plenary session, then: for people unused to such drama, a monument of history indeed.

Smiley makes a rare joke, which is followed by dense, relieved laughter. “This case is littered with people pretending to be dead,” he complains. “It will be a positive relief to me to find a real corpse somewhere.” Only hours later, this mot was remembered with a shudder.

Told ’em,” she repeats, hauling at the mongrel’s ear in her emotion. “Put it all in a paper, ‘Threat of Deviation by Emerging Socialist Partner.’ Circulated every little brute in Moscow Centre’s Collegium. Drafted it word for word in his clever little mind while he was doing a spot of time in Siberia for Uncle Joe Stalin, bless him. ‘Spy on your friends today, they’re certain to be your enemies tomorrow,’ he told them. Oldest maxim of the trade, Karla’s favourite. When he was given his job back, he practically nailed it on the door in Dzerzhinski Square. No one paid a blind bit of notice.

And so forth and so on,” he says deprecatingly, for, like most of the Circus, he has a rooted dislike of military matters and would prefer the more artistic targets.

Driving on, they passed a village and a cinema. Even the latest films up here are silents, Jerry recalled. He had once done a story about them. Local actors made the voices and invented whatever plots came into their heads. He remembered John Wayne with a squeaky Thai voice, and the audience ecstatic, and the interpreter explaining to him that they were hearing an imitation of the local mayor, who was a famous queen.

On the Thai bank everything was immediately impossible. Jerry’s visa was not enough, his photographs bore no likeness, the whole area was forbidden to farangs. Ten dollars secured a revised opinion.

Then to the job itself—Charlie’s father, the General, still speaking: “‘Certain very fine Chiu Chow gentlemen who are pretty good friends of pretty good friends of mine, hear me, happen to have a controlling interest in a certain aviation company. Also I got certain shares in that company. Also this company happens to bear the distinguished title of Indocharter Aviation. So these good friends, they do me a favour to assist me in my disgrace for my three-legged spider-bastard son and I pray sincerely you may fall out of the sky and break your kwailo neck.

At another point, Charlie Marshall wept and seized Jerry’s hands and enquired between sobs whether Jerry also had a father. “Yes, sport, I did,” said Jerry patiently. “And in his way he was a general too.

And for a moment he saw himself—and the city—in the days when the Cambodian war still had a certain ghastly innocence: ace operator Westerby, risking mono, bouncing boyishly over the brown water of the Mekong, towed by a jolly Dutchman in a speed launch that burned enough petrol to feed a family for a week. The greatest hazard was the two-foot wave, he remembered, which rolled down the river every time the guards on the bridge let off a depth-charge to prevent the Khmer Rouge divers from blowing it up. But now the river was theirs, so was the jungle. And so, tomorrow or the next day, was the town.

Contrary to later rumour, the two men did not meet in Saigon. Nor did they meet in the course of the northern roll-back. The last they saw of each other, in any mutual sense, was on that final evening in Phnom Penh, when Jerry had bawled Luke out and Luke had sulked: and that’s fact—a commodity which was afterwards notoriously hard to come by.

The shelling had stopped, leaving the night to the geckos. Jerry remembered that Cambodians liked to gamble on the number of times they cheeped: tomorrow will be a lucky day; tomorrow won’t; tomorrow I will take a bride; no, the day after.

In the old days perhaps, Jerry had gone for more select reasons. In order to know himself: the Hemingway game. In order to raise his threshold of fear. Because in battle, as in love, desire escalates. When you have been machine-gunned, single rounds seem trivial. When you’ve been shelled to pieces, the machine-gunning’s child’s play, if only because the impact of plain shot leaves your brain in place, where the clump of a shell blows it through your ears. And there is a peace: he remembered that too. At bad times in his life—money, children, women all adrift—there had been a sense of peace that came from realising that staying alive was his only responsibility.

The American diplomat, a model of courteous self-criticism, supplied the amusing epilogue. “The Cambodians have an old superstition, Mr. Westerby,” he said. “When there’s an eclipse of the moon, you must make a lot of noise. You must shoot off fireworks, you must bang tin cans, or, best still, fire off a million dollars’ worth of ordnance. Because if you don’t—why, the frogs will gobble up the moon. We should have known, but we didn’t know, and in consequence we were made to look very, very silly indeed,” he said proudly. “Yes, I’m afraid you boobed there, old boy,” the Counsellor said with satisfaction. But though the American’s smile remained frank and open his eyes continued to impart something far more pressing—such as a message between professionals.

There was one other member of the party and he lurked alone on top of the cases in the tail, head almost against the roof, and it was not possible to make him out in any detail. He sat with a bottle of whisky to himself, and even a glass to himself. He wore a Fidel Castro hat and a full beard. Gold links glittered on his dark arms, known in those days (to all but those who wore them) as C.I.A. bracelets, on the happy assumption that a man ditched in hostile country could buy his way to safety by doling out a link at a time. But his eyes, as they watched Jerry along the well-oiled barrel of an AK-47 automatic rifle, had a fixed brightness.

What else do you sell, sport?” “Sir, I sell all things to all gentlemen.” They foxed around. No, said Jerry, it was nothing to smoke that he wanted, and nothing to swallow, nothing to sniff and nothing for the wrists, either. And no, thank you, with all respect to the many beautiful sisters, cousins, and young men of his circle, Jerry’s other needs were also taken care of. “Then, oh, gladness, sir, you are a most happy man.

Jerry trod very carefully now. His instinct for cover was stronger than ever. The Honourable Gerald Westerby, the distinguished hack, reports on the siege economy. When you’re my size, sport, you have to have a hell of a good reason for whatever you’re doing. So he put out smoke, as the jargon goes.

Poms get education,” Keller explained. Jerry hadn’t remembered him so talkative. “They get raised. That right, Westerby? Specially lords, right? Westerby’s some kind of lord.” “That’s us, sport. Scholars to a man. Not like you hayseeds.