INTRODUCTION
The Honourable Schoolboy is the second novel of the Karla Trilogy, which includes Tinker, Tailor, Soldier (1974), Spy and Smiley's People (1979); it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.

SHORT SYNOPSIS
George Smiley (Simon Russell Beale) has become the chief of 'The Circus' (the British Secret Service) in the wake of a demoralizing infiltration by a Soviet double agent and must now rebuild trust in the shattered organisation. He recruits Jerry Westerby (Hugh Bonneville), occasional spy, occasional news reporter, full-time romantic  - "The Honourable Schoolboy" - and despatches him to the Far East, a burial ground of French, British, and American colonial cultures, where a new battle is about to begin. A story of international subterfuge, conflicting loyalties and hopeless love.

The Honourable Schoolboy is available in paperback from Amazon UK or Amazon US.

Detailed synopsis (Wikipedia)
Review by Candida L Eittreim

CHARACTER DESCRIPTION: Bill Craw ("Old Craw")
"In Shanghai, where his career had started, he had been teaboy and city editor to the only English-speaking journal in the port. Since then, he had covered the Communists against Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang against the Japanese and the Americans against practically everyone. Craw gave them a sense of history in this rootless place. His style of speech, which at typhoon times even the hardiest might pardonably find irksome, was a genuine hangover from the thirties, when Australia provided the bulk of journalists in the Orient, and the Vatican, for some reason, the jargon of their companionship."
"Beneath his various disguises, Craw was a complex and solitary figure, as everyone round the table knew. Under the willed roughness of his manner lay a love of the East which seemed sometimes to string him tighter than he could stand, so that there were months when he would disappear from sight altogether and, like a sulky elephant, go off on his private paths until he was once more fit to live with."
(Excerpts from Chapter 1)