I’ve been rereading much of the George Smiley corpus this summer and I happened upon this riff on men in cars from Le Carre’s first book, Call for the Dead:

Mendel drove very well, with a kind of schoolma’amish pedantry that Smiley would have found comic. The Weybridge road was packed with traffic as usual. Mendel hated motorists. Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage. He didn’t care who it was–he’d seen bishops in purple doing seventy in a built-up area, frightening pedestrians out of their wits.