Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy characters

Appears from the start

A new temporary French master at Thursgood's, a small preparatory school in the west of England, who arrives in mid-term driving a battered car and towing a caravan he lives in at the edge of the playing fields. Physically powerful but visibly damaged, with a crooked back and a stiffness he will not explain, he is a good and unexpectedly popular teacher, watchful of the road and of strangers, and gives no account of what he did before he came.

Also known as Jumbo

Appears from the start

A plump, short-sighted, unhappy new boy at Thursgood's, the child of separated parents, anxious to be useful and convinced he is a failure. He attaches himself to the new master, appoints himself his watcher, and notices things the adults do not.

First appears in chapter 3

A short, plump, bespectacled former intelligence officer, badly dressed and easily overlooked, who was the old chief's closest lieutenant and was forced into retirement when that chief fell. He lives alone in Chelsea, works on seventeenth-century German poets, and waits for his wife Ann to come back. Patient, meticulous and formidably retentive, he is the only man alive who knows the service's recent history in full detail, which is why he is fetched out of retirement.

First appears in chapter 3

Smiley's wife, beautiful, aristocratic and serially unfaithful, currently absent from the marriage. She is present throughout as an absence: the standing wound in Smiley's life and the one subject on which his judgement is known to be unreliable.

First appears in chapter 3

A fat, gossiping Whitehall figure who dines well and collects intelligence-world rumour as a hobby. His indiscreet talk at a club dinner is Smiley's first sign that something is moving.

First appears in chapter 4

A younger officer of the Circus, once Smiley's protege, now head of the scalphunters, the section that does the sordid jobs, and sidelined by the new regime to a basement office in Brixton. Loyal to Smiley, resentful of his own demotion and privately frightened of what he is being asked to do, he becomes Smiley's man inside the service.

First appears in chapter 4

A senior civil servant responsible for overseeing the intelligence services on the Cabinet Office's behalf: dry, cautious, and chiefly concerned with what can be defended to a Minister. He is the man who receives an allegation nobody wants to hear and who reluctantly authorises a private investigation outside the service's own machinery.

First appears in chapter 5

The former head of the Circus, referred to only by his title: secretive, ill and increasingly isolated in his last year, running private enquiries from a locked upper room and trusting almost nobody. His final operation ended in disaster and forced his resignation, and he died shortly afterwards.

First appears in chapter 6

A field man of the scalphunters section, sharp, insolent and not quite trusted by anyone: the son of a colonial missionary, resourceful, mercenary and given to self-dramatisation. He has been missing since an assignment in Hong Kong went wrong, and reappears with a story his own service will not want to believe.

First appears in chapter 6

A Soviet woman travelling with a trade delegation, married to a man she despises and doing work considerably more important than her cover suggests. Lonely, devout in her own way and desperate to get out, she keeps a private diary and offers to trade what she knows for asylum.

First appears in chapter 6

The chief of the Circus, a large, ambitious Scot who spent years being blocked by his predecessor and now runs the service in his own style, with an inner circle and a direct line to Whitehall. His position rests on a spectacular source of Soviet material that has restored the Circus's standing with the Cabinet and with the Americans.

First appears in chapter 6

The Circus's most glamorous officer and the head of London Station: a painter, a linguist, an Arabist with a legendary field record and an easy charm that has made him the service's darling for twenty years. He is connected to Smiley's wife's family, moves through Whitehall as if he owned it, and is now one of the small group at the top of the reorganised Circus.

First appears in chapter 6

A Circus officer specialising in the satellite countries, a working-class scholarship man who spent years under cover in Eastern Europe building networks. Blunt, heavy and openly interested in the rewards of his position, he is another member of the chief's inner group.

First appears in chapter 6

A Hungarian by origin, head of the Circus's lamplighters, who provide surveillance, safe houses and couriers. Small, immaculate, unfailingly deferential to whoever is in the ascendant, he has survived every change of regime by attaching himself early to the winning side.

First appears in chapter 8

A police inspector, long retired, who worked with Smiley years earlier and is glad of the company and the work. Methodical, discreet and entirely outside the service, he does the watching, driving and legwork that Smiley cannot risk asking the Circus for.

First appears in chapter 12

The Circus's great researcher on Soviet intelligence, a huge, shabby, drinking woman with an encyclopaedic memory for Moscow Centre's personnel, who was pensioned off against her will and now lives in Oxford. She loved the service and its people, remembers everything, and has spent her retirement nursing both the memories and a discovery nobody would let her pursue.

First appears in chapter 13

A cultural attache at the Soviet embassy in London, long resident, sociable and apparently harmless, who attends receptions and cultivates journalists. Connie Sachs's research suggested that his history did not fit a cultural officer's career at all.

First appears in chapter 20

A Circus officer who was duty officer on the night the service's last great operation collapsed, and who left the service soon afterwards. He now manages a London gambling club: smooth, watchful and careful about what he says and to whom.

First appears in chapter 22

A sporting journalist and part-time Circus hand, an amiable, hard-drinking Englishman of good family who does occasional jobs for the service and asks few questions. He carried a message that turned out to matter more than he understood at the time.

First appears in chapter 23

A senior officer of Moscow Centre who runs its most sensitive agents in the West, known to the Circus by a work name and by little else: a patient, disciplined professional who survived the purges and thinks in decades. Smiley encountered him years earlier in an Indian jail, tried to persuade him to defect, and failed.