In Washington for the past year, the will of the people has been ignored. It has not been ignored because Congress is taking action against the president on a great moral issue in which the public has no interest. The will of the people...

Despite the spirited rallying by a crowd of several hundred people to protest what they say are unfair attacks on District Mayor Marion Barry, a deep discomfort over the scandal continues to grip this city. Last week's sentencing of Alphonse G. Hill and...

Nearly two decades ago, in Call for the Dead, John le Carre introduced us to George Smiley and began, along with Len Deighton, a reformation and exaltation of the spy novel as a literary genre. In Smiley's People, the latest and last of Smiley's labyrinthian confrontations with his Russian counterpart Karla, le Carre both completes an epic story and reveals the temporal limits of his chosen form. Smiley has been with us for so long now that it is difficult to appreciate the huge change le Carr...

Le Carré's recent novels have portrayed, with a great deal of detail and diligently evoked atmosphere, two distinct worlds of espionage: Smiley's world in London, a domain of desks and files and intrigues and research, an awkward corner in the corridors of Anglo-American power; and the world of the active agent, the field…. In "Smiley's People," Smiley works both worlds, is both detective and agent at risk. I won't disclose the oblique, slow-moving plo...

The Master of Stasis has returned, driving his dense herd of auxiliary words to the glue factory. John le Carré is back again with the same novel as before…. Le Carré has to be an Olympic-class sprinter but not a distance runner. In those stretches of [Smiley's People] which are the nub and reason for his story, he is brilliant. He is a gifted short-form writer who has decided that the longer form could be more rewarding…. Smiley's People seems to me to have been me...