Simon Russell Beale

George Smiley was simply doing a favor for Miss Ailsa Brimley, an old friend and editor of a small newspaper. Miss Brimley had received a letter from a worried reader: "I'm not mad. And I know my husband is trying to kill me." But the letter had arrived too late: its scribe, the wife of an assistant master at the distinguished Carne School, was already dead. So George Smiley went to Carne to listen, ask questions, and think. And to uncover, layer...

In London at dead of night, George Smiley, sometime acting Chief of the Circus (aka the British Secret Service), is summoned from his lonely bed by news of the murder of an ex-agent. Lured back to active service, Smiley skillfully maneuvers his people -- "the no-men of no-man's land" -- into crisscrossing Paris, London, Germany, and Switzerland as he prepares for his own final, inevitable duel on the Berlin border with his Soviet counterpart and archenemy,...

Written during his time in Reading Gaol, De Profundis is Oscar Wilde's moving letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, whose relationship with Wilde led to the poet's imprisonment. Here Wilde repudiates Lord Alfred and reflects on his ordeal, acknowledging how the depths of his sorrow have helped liberate him towards a fuller, freer wisdom. Brimming with beautiful passages, De Profundis is a profound and inspiring treatise on the meaning of

...

In the second part of John le Carré's Karla Trilogy, the battle of wits between spymaster George Smiley and his Russian adversary takes on an even more dangerous dimension.
As the fall of Saigon looms, master spy George Smiley must outmaneuver his Soviet counterpart on a battlefield that neither can afford to lose.
 
The mole has been eliminated, but the damage wrought has brought the British Secret Service to...