"I don't hold with politics," the Superintendent confided to Smiley inconsequentially, staring downward still. "I don't hold with politics and I don't hold with politicians either. Licensed lunatics most of them, in my view."
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, March 05, 2026
Licensed Lunatics
John le Carré (1931-2020), Smiley's People (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), p. 36 (chapter 3):