In a light-hearted moment Smiley asks Fawn if he posts the football pools that Tarr has been entering. This was previously the most popular form of betting on football matches in Britain up to the eighties, now overtaken by on-line betting.
George Smiley recounts to Peter Guillam that Karla had been in England in 1936 and again in 1941. Patrick Stewart, who plays Karla, was born in 1940.
When Karla leaves Smiley at the end of the Indian jail interrogation he takes Smiley's cigarettes and lighter (a gift from Anne). This symbolic scene is enacted again at the end of Smileys People.