“It was from us they learnt the secret of life: that we grow old without growing wise. They realized that nothing happened when we grew up: no blinding light on the road to Damascus, no sudden feeling of maturity.”
Second Le Carre book, after “Call for the Dead”. This one is a disappointment, because it’s not a spy novel at all. Just quite a regular mystery novel with Smiley as the protagonist. But other than a reference to a middle-class woman as “she was red brick” and a description of the local chief of police in his office as a “water rat on a raft, his hair all wet”, there isn’t much I could get out of it.