High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Toby Esterhase is a fictional character in John le Carré's George Smiley spy novels including Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People, as well as some of the stories in The Secret Pilgrim. He is a high-ranking officer in "The Circus" (the British Secret Intelligence Service), eventually becoming head of "lamplighters."Esterhase is Hungarian. George Smiley recruited him in Vienna, when he was a starving student living in the ruins of a museum of which his dead uncle had been curator. He eventually rose to be head of the Lamplighter division (the Circus name for a host of covert "service" personnel, whose duties include covert surveillance and courier deliveries, and maintaining safe houses).