John Miller was no longer living at Sancreed, having distanced himself from David after his partner M After Agent Running in the Field (2019), a novel with parallels to the Edward Snowden affair, he started a book with the working title The George Smiley Years, which included an encounter between Smiley and his arch-nemesis and foil Karla, after the Russian spy chief’s defection to the West. He produced a shelf of books about a British intelligence service whose concerns mirrored the nation’s struggle to determine what it was without an empire. In a 1950 letter to his girlfriend Ann, le Carré wrote that he had been captured, stripped naked, and beaten.

The disgust with commerce would be echoed by “bloody” Bill Haydon—a traitor and as such not exactly an authorial stand-in—in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: “He spoke not of the decline of the West, but of its death by greed and constipation. He told an audience in 1997: “I was brought up in a bookless household, and I have a natural sympathy for people who grow up without the example of reading, or come late to it, or never come at all. He continued turning down British honours, as well as an appearance on Desert Island Discs (“I have great admiration for your programme and it seems to get along fine without me”), while accepting awards in France and Germany. As le Carré’s own life filled with glitz, he was making his name by ridding the spy thriller of that very same quality.In them he told her about his work, his life in Cornwall, and aspects of his past that helped to explain why he was the way he was. Soon afterwards she would send him a photo, revealing that she was, as perhaps he suspected, a woman of color, with luxuriant curling dark hair. She is the addressee of many of the early missives collected in A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré, edited by their son Tim Cornwell, a journalist who died after finishing work on the volume this past May.

After several telephone conversations in which she was nervous and he reassured her, he arrived unexpectedly early on the Friday evening, bearing champagne, foie gras, and a typescript of his novel, which he presented to her.Sydney Pollack is supposed to be directing the movie of The Night Manager and I would be enormously tickled if you were to find a place in it. There’s no naming names here, either, but the letters to Susan Anderson (a museum curator) and Yvette Pierpaoli (an aid worker) read like those of a lover, and to Susan Kennaway, his affair with whom is well known, he describes himself as “a mole too used to the dark to believe in light”. In my day, we were told we were little apostles for truth, pledged to speak fearlessly to power,” he said.

Rather tactlessly, perhaps, he mentioned that several married women in Panama had made approaches to him (he would mention it again in a subsequent letter); though he assured her that he had resisted them—not least from fear of what their husbands might do to him if they found out.In his autobiography, “ The Pigeon Tunnel” (2016), he wrote of how his love for spy thrillers had led him to work for British intelligence as a teen-ager, high off “Kipling’s Kim and any number of chauvinistic adventure stories by G. His sympathy, however, never blinded him to the reality that all people have, in the end, a choice to make.

Beginning with his 1940s childhood, it includes accounts of his National Service and his time at Oxford, and his days teaching the ‘chinless, pointy-nosed gooseberry-eyed British lords’ at Eton.During this phase, on a holiday in Saint Moritz in 1950, he met Ann Sharp, the daughter of a Royal Air Force officer. In these letters, le Carre reveals himself to be a consummate correspondent as well as a master novelist. Ahead of one of his trips to Russia, le Carré was approached about meeting Philby to hear his side of the story. No, you are not rotund or double chinned, though I think I have seen you in rôles where you have, almost as an act of will, acquired a sort of cherubic look! Smiley, back in England, tracks down her family, working-class strivers, who brag that she is in Laos working for British intelligence.