Robin Carmody messaged me on FB to say he’d just been reading my le carré rereads on ilx, and enjoyed and agreed with them. Since one of my projects here is I guess to begin to centralise my boringly dispersed and rhizomatic self, I thought I’d link them here. This is the original, inset in a longer ilx thread: liveblogging Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This is the same excerpted at FT (i.e. all the rest of the entertaining ilx chatter cut away). This was intended as a liveblog of a reread of Smiley’s People, except things ran away with themselves and I ended up just posting some thoughts (on an ilx thread no one else ever contributed to).
Tag: Stalin
our morals and theirs
His politics is what he does. What he says — his “line” — is merely how he gets his hand on someone’s wallet, or up someone’s skirt. Ideologues and intellectuals — left, right, centre, other — are often (actually not so) strangely boneheaded about this. They’ve invested so much in mastering specific verbal arguments, big technical shibboleth words and metrics, that they can’t bear to cede how very much easier they are to play as a result.