George Smiley

George Smiley - short, plump, bespectacled and by his own account unremarkable - is the quiet intelligence officer at the centre of John le Carré's nine Smiley novels, from Call for the Dead in 1961 to A Legacy of Spies in 2017. The early books range from a murder at a public school to the bleak Cold War of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, in which Smiley stays mostly in the background. At the heart of the series is the Karla Trilogy, in which Smiley hunts a Soviet mole at the top of the Circus and then pursues his opposite number in Moscow, Karla. Le Carré's spies are tired, compromised people working for institutions that use them up, and the books are as much about loyalty and betrayal as about espionage.