The Honourable Schoolboy

The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carre

George Smiley has become chief of the battered British Secret Service. The betrayals of a Soviet double agent have riddled the spy network. Smiley wants revenge. He chooses his weapon: Jerry Westerby, 'The Honourable Schoolboy', a passionate lover, and a seasoned, reckless secret agent. Westerby is pointed east, to Hong Kong. And so begins the terrifying game...

The Honourable Company - A History of the English East India Company

For 213 years, beginning around 1700, the "incorrigible pioneering" of merchant traders of the East India Company furthered the "peculiarly diffuse character" of the British Empire. British author Keay tells an ambitious story with sweep and brio, encompassing the company's origins as a "bane of bedraggled pioneers" in search of spices in the remote Indonesian archipelago; its role in the 1690 founding of Calcutta (an episode of "commercial greed and political mayhem"); and the opening up of China in 1700, which was to become the company's most profitable trade.