Le Carré situates spying within the wider, mundane world. This, I believe, is why so many insist that he is a genre outlier, rather than an example of what can be accomplished within “genre writing” when the material is honored.

“I came to the Beastie Boys because I had heard my peers talking about them, and I believed talked-about things were things worth knowing. My personal mission was to learn a little bit about everything I heard referenced, and to have at the ready my own opinion on each topic.”

“My delicious red children. I go back to my spot on the bed and as I pop a berry into my mouth like a pill, I decide to listen to the audiobook of Lana Del Rey’s new poetry book.”

The answer to the “Negro question” is a mix of sermon and jeremiad, calling attention to the gap between a desired moral universe and disastrous present reality.

“Time seems not so much to progress as to waft through each novel… solitude enables past, present and future to press in like ghosts.”

“By preventing myself from thinking about how to do more with my day or why I hadn’t accomplished as much as so-and-so—by ‘doing nothing’—I constructed a new framework of what mattered to me.”