Few figures in literature have been as passive and undemonstrative as George Smiley. And yet, right there in the second chapter of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the spirit of le Carré’s intelligence agent was uncharacteristically lifted by a humble bookshop. Smiley, we’re told, “approached Heywood Hill with a merry heart.”
Which isn’t to say that Heywood Hill is any old bookshop. It’s been a stalwart of Mayfair’s Curzon Street since it first opened, in 1936, and the frontage includes two significant fixtures: a Royal Warrant (Heywood Hill was, it is said, Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite bookshop) and a blue plaque, reminding visitors that Nancy Mitford had worked there for three years during the Second World War. During that period of time, Evelyn Waugh described Heywood Hill as “a centre for all that was left of fashionable and intellectual London.”
