View image in fullscreen The author with Gary Oldman at the premiere of ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, London 2011. Ahead of one of his trips to Russia, le Carré was approached about meeting Philby to hear his side of the story. Later, though, he takes in his surroundings with the eyes of a spy and the insight of a novelist: “This is how they tried to win, Jerry thought: from inside sound-proof rooms, through smoked glass, using machines at arm’s length.

If you live, as I have, so long in the dark, you can’t always, if you are me, have faith in the light. If you are a novelist struggling to explore a nation’s psyche,” he wrote in his memoir, “its Secret Service is not an unreasonable place to look. The letter F indicated,” he told a London audience in 2007, “that our target was Communist subversion in all its perceived variations. The high literary references are unusual: he was more of a Wodehouse man and read with painful slowness, in part because of dyslexia.

He marched against war in Iraq and described Tony Blair as “a mendacious little show-off … fucking up the world in his Noddy car”. She would be an affectionate correspondent of her stepson’s until her death, still sending him sweaters for his birthday into his forties.

I’ve had an amazing run,” he says when facing death, and exults in his life with Jane as two “old honeymooners on a cliff”.After he left, Susan, still in her flimsy nightdress, collapsed sobbing to the floor; then, to her surprise, he came back, and grabbed her in a fierce embrace. This could be an editorial choice on the part of his son, but le Carré’s characters are likewise often identified by their profession (“The Night Manager,” “The Tailor of Panama”) or in pursuit of a profession that could give them a sense of identity. In a 1980 letter to his stepmother, he mentions that Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film of Smiley’s People, but he turned him down to stick with Guinness and the BBC. Of course they had not been lovers at all: by the end of August they had been corresponding for almost a year, and still had yet to meet. For my money, I would ask you to play Corkoran tomorrow but we are dealing with minds that function on other planes, so they will probably give it to Dicky Attenborough.

A Private Spy spans seven decades and chronicles not only le Carre's own life but the turbulent times to which he was witness. Hence discussions on painting for instance are somewhat limited by the extent to which a boy will confess himself impressed. The article was otherwise so crowded with inaccuracies that I for one would not know how to address it without cutting it to pieces. He had a fascination with monks but they couldn’t have been more different from his father Ronnie, a divorcé (le Carré’s mother left him when the boy was five) and a criminal who would soon be exposed in the press as a heavy-duty con man after a bankruptcy that made headlines. The description is eerily similar to one le Carré offered of Philby in a letter to a journalist: Philby was “a nasty little establishment traitor with a revolting father, a fake stammer and an anguished sexuality who spent his life getting his own back on the England that made him.Voinov [a Soviet critic who reviewed A Spy Who Came In From The Cold], I suspect, smelt in my writing the greatest heresy of all: that there is no victory and no virtue in the Cold War, only a condition of human illness and a political misery. His own service as a spy was short-lived—including a few years undercover in Germany with a cover identity as a junior diplomat in the early 1960s. Le Carré was an avid skier and his letters to Ann combine details of his injuries on the slopes with sweet and unbridled notes of longing for her, shades of the romantic effusiveness shared by many of the characters he would later create. In the original piece I wrote that even if nobody else in the cinema liked it, I would still be clapping. The son of a confidence trickster, he spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld.

Russia is a kind of Czarist Wild West, but tortured by guilt, religion, laziness, and its own unbelievable waste of talent. He asked her to forgive “the awful silence”; and assured her that “I’m not that person anymore and won’t be again. He had been recruited by British intelligence two years earlier while studying German at the University of Bern.A prolific correspondent and artful curator of his own life, the British novelist John le Carré left behind a trove of personal letters when he died, age 89, at the end of 2020.