Soldier Spy

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The character is portrayed as homosexual in the film (a departure from the novels), and as making the painful decision to break up with his boyfriend. Swedish director Tomas Alfredson made a film adaptation in 2011, based on a screenplay by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan. The series was repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra in June and July 2016, and has since been released as a boxed set by the BBC.

Karla does not appear again in le Carré's novels, except a brief mention in The Secret Pilgrim, when Smiley tells a group of probationary intelligence officers that he was the one who debriefed Karla in captivity. StudioCanal UK distributed the film in the United Kingdom, where it was released on 16 September 2011. It's scarce wonder that that Smiley has become almost as legendary a figure as [Kim] Philby, for Tinker, Tailor with all its outward verisimilitude, constructs a potent and appealing myth for the class-ridden and post-imperial angst of Britain in the 1970s.

Smiley is a career intelligence officer with " The Circus", the British overseas intelligence agency.

Assimilation is his highest aim, he learns to love the crowds who pass him in the street without a glance; he clings to them for his anonymity and his safety. The high quality of Witchcraft's intelligence is designed to lure the CIA into sharing intelligence with Britain, which the mole can then also leak to Karla.Esterhase personally assembled the Lamplighters by recruiting housewives, vagabonds, and other individuals whom no one would suspect of espionage work, and honing them into an efficient, tightly-knit unit that becomes something of a surrogate family for them. Smiley is appointed temporary head of the Circus to deal with the fallout, and is still head at the start of the second book of The Karla Trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy.

Bernard Hepton played Esterhase in the BBC television dramatisations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People. After this, she almost always managed to take her children with her, preferring to put them in danger than to be separated from them.

In 1982, the BBC adapted Smiley's People into a miniseries, in which Michael Byrne played the role due to Jayston's unavailability. The novel is emblematic of a British "rottenness," according to critic David Monaghan, and le Carré locates it with a failure of the British ruling class itself, which has become directionless and self-seeking. Recruited by Smiley at Oxford, he was the top specialist in Soviet satellite states and spent several years undercover as a left-wing academic in the Balkans before being instated in the Circus.