Hacker News Reader

Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

The TV series really were perfection and not just down to Sir Alec Guinness. Ian Richardson, Bernard Hepton, Michael Jayston etc were all wonderful - not to mention Arthur Hopcraft's adaptation. The opening scene with four men, an office, no action and four words of dialogue, yet a world of detail sets the tone for the rest of the series [1]

Recently re-reading TTSS with Alec Guinness's Smiley in my imagination was a wonderful experience. Thank you John Le Carre.

PS One oddity is that in TTSS Toby Esterhase has a British accent but in SP he's acquired a broad Hungarian one!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShPPjxlmp4U

View on HN

Toby Esterhazy does mention that he tried his hand at playing the English gentleman, and was quite done with it. I would like to have known some more background of Toby. Especially, how Hungarians came to Britain in the mid 20th century. Not quite totally unrelated is the Monty Python sketch on the Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook, which also alludes to the wave of Hungarian migrants:

http://www.montypython.net/scripts/phrasebk.php

I have some anecdotal experience here - my supervisor at College in Britain in the 1980s was a Hungarian mathematician who left Hungary in the late 1960s having had difficulties with the authorities. He vowed never to return to Hungary and had fairly trenchant views on the regime!

Incidentally, my supervision partner was also Hungarian and has now returned and is running a bank in Budapest.

In the novel of TTSS, it is explained that Toby was a starving (literally rather than figuratively) student living in Vienna after WWII and Smiley recruited him there to the Circus (MI6).

I often wondered if this was on purpose. He was known for affecting a very English Gent persona and by SP he was openly living as a fraudulent art dealer after leaving the Circus under a cloud

That sounds like a possibility. On reflection the accent in TTSS - with no trace of his original accent - is the oddity. But then I guess he was a spy so would be good at that sort of thing!

His last name was also pronounced totally differently.. Esterhaus.. I never understand why!

Here's how the name is pronounced in the native Hungarian: https://forvo.com/word/esterházy/

I'd consider anything else a creative approximation.

Thanks for this - really useful and interesting resource. (And I now know how to pronounce Bartok!)

You can just google ‘pronunciation of X’. Works well for common names.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com