Apart from plumpness, you have all the other physical qualities: a mildness of manner, stretched taut, when you wish it, by an unearthly stillness and an electrifying watchfulness. In the best sense, you are uncomfortable company, as I suspect Smiley is. An audience wishes – when you wish it – to take you into its protection. It feels responsible for you, it worries about you. I don’t know what you call that kind of empathy but it is very rare, & Smiley and Guinness have it: when either of you gets his feet wet, I can’t help shivering. So it is the double standard – to be unobtrusive, yet to command – which your physique perfectly satisfies. Smiley is an Abbey, made up of different periods, fashions and even different religions, not all of them necessarily harmonious. His authority springs from experience, ages of it, compassion, and at root an inconsolable pessimism which gives a certain fatalism to much that he does. Alec Guinness as George Smiley in the TV adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 1979. Photograph: Allstar/BBC/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

John le Carré obituary | John le Carré | The Guardian John le Carré obituary | John le Carré | The Guardian

When a much-loved author dies, fans and publishers cling for a while to the hope that an undiscovered manuscript lurks in a drawer, promising a final echo of that familiar voice. So last week’s news that a collected volume of John le Carré’s letters will be published in November understandably sent a frisson through the literary world. Le Carré achieved the rare double of popular and critical acclaim, but his life offered as much intrigue as any of his plots: his fraudster father; the formative years in the intelligence services; the glittering literary and film career; the vocal political engagement. There’s also his longevity: the letters span the decades from his 1940s childhood to the days before his death in December 2020, aged 89. Few people could be as well placed to offer such a comprehensive first-hand account of recent history. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Prose quality is guaranteed le Carré, but what was most entertaining, was living through decades when I was not born yet, to recent times, when I have wondered how older, critically thinking people have experienced them. Don’t say he didn’t warn us. Misdirection, evasions and plants. Nested identities. Russian dolls. If we learn one thing from A Private Spy, his selected letters, it is that Cornwell/le Carré was always, to some degree or other, playing by Moscow Rules. His views of British and American intelligence activities were muted but not silent. He had opinions that he expressed and believed that Britain was a failed nation (not his words, but my reading). His grandmother was born in Cork and Cornwell finally applied for and received Irish citizenship based on his grandmother's Irish birthright (although there are now restrictions, Ireland permits a descendant of any person born in Ireland not more than 3 generations away from the birth to become an Irish citizen upon application) about a year or so before he died. He was very candid about it: he despised Brexit and thought Boris Johnson was an oaf. When he was notified of having received Irish citizenship, he wrote a letter to the Irish official charged with processing immigrant applications for citizenship, thanking her and her staff for the "honour" of granting him citizenship. His expression of joy was simply that: no hard feelings toward Boris or Brexit, just joy at being Irish.Our home news is not too bright. Jane has developed an inoperable cancer and is undergoing a severe course of chemotherapy. The wonder pills I have been taking for the same complaint have run their course, and the next stage is to nuke me with an experimental radioactive infusion every six weeks. But we prevail, the kids are being wonderful, I am entering my 90th year, Jane is 8 years behind, we have been married for half a century and never been closer. And I continue to write most days. Le Carré's letters reveal a man who could at times be ingenuous, even dishonest, with those closest to him Thanks for yours, and please forgive this typed response: I am in the late throes of the novel. The family bad news has brightened..... I would be puzzled to know, if I were in Putin’s position, how to run Donald Trump as my asset. I have no doubt that they have obtained him, and they could probably blow him out of the water whenever they felt like it, but I think they are having much more fun feeding his contradictions and contributing to the chaos. The terrifying thing is, the closer he draws to Putin, the more he lies and denies, the stronger his support among the faithful. You don’t need to own Trump as an agent. You just have to let him run. We are moving to London for an unknown period while I change the atmosphere around the book. I hope to have completed some kind of first draft by the Fall. I have loved John le Carre's writing for some time. I have many of his books. My concern in reading books like this are the first question: Were they writing for posterity? Is there a falsity to the correspondence? In this case, I would say "no."

Letters of John le Carré 1945-2020 A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré 1945-2020

How wonderful to have your letter, the contents of which I passed to Jonathan Powell at the BBC this morning. If possible, he was even happier than I was to hear that, in principle, you are enthusiastic to take on Smiley. The harsh Martin Ritt movie of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), starring Richard Burton and Claire Bloom, won four Bafta awards, including best British film. Le Carré’s account of the making of the movie appears in The Pigeon Tunnel. Thanks so much for your very touching letter. Your feelings about Brexit spoke into my heart. Just now I wd rather be Dutch, German, French, or for that matter Polish, than a Brit subjected to this truly shaming process in which we are engaged. ....In the end, I selected a quite different tie, an equally awful confection of blue upon blue. Mrs. Thatcher is one of those politicians who are even more unreal than their waxworks. The eyeballs are straighter, the perfect vowels are prerecorded, each sentence makes a deadly point and jokes are out of place unless they are hers. Thank you very much for your letter. To be a spy, you need first to know what you think about the world, whom you would like to help, whom to frustrate. This, I am afraid, takes time. Also, you have to decide how much you are prepared to do by dishonest means. You are very young to decide to be dishonest. My guess is, you want excitement and a great cause. But I think and hope that if you ever find the great cause, the excitement will come naturally from the pleasure of serving it, & then you won’t need to deceive anybody, you will have found what you are looking for. You will be more than a spy then. You will be a good, happy man. Fry first wrote in 1991. ‘The English dam can withstand the pressure of 15 years of admiration and affection no longer,’ he said. ‘The only writer I’ve ever written to apart from yourself was PG Wodehouse.’ After reading The Night Manager, he wrote again.

John le Carré’s letters may be boring — but his mistress’s John le Carré’s letters may be boring — but his mistress’s

Soon after the deaths of John le Carré, AKA David Cornwell, and his wife, Jane, weeks apart in 2020 and 2021, a long silence came to an end. In The Secret Heart, a memoir published last autumn, le Carré’s sometime research assistant, Sue “Suleika” Dawson, outed herself as one of more than a dozen women to have had an affair with the former intelligence agent after the success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) encouraged him to give up the day job and, seemingly, monogamy.David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, at home with his sons Stephen, left, and Simon, 1964. Photograph: Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images Curiously enough, the structure follows a similar path to that in Mel Brooks' autobiography, “All About Me!”. The first chapters deal with early life, then once he starts producing books, the chapters are titled with the names of the novels he was working on at the time. With Mel, it was the movies.

letters of John le Carré A Private Spy audiobook review – the letters of John le Carré

Le Carré's letters reveal a man who could at times be ingenuous, even dishonest, with those closest to him — married twice, he had numerous furtive affairs, which are only occasionally revealed here — and at other times brutally honest with himself and others.

It is very kind of you to seek my opinion on the Nobel Prize in Literature, but I must tell you honestly that I have never given the subject a moment’s thought, except perhaps to reflect that, like the Olympic Games, a great concept has been ruined by political greed. This is probably the last major piece of work we'll see about him, unless someone does a big biography. But frankly, with “The Pigeon Tunnel” combined with this book, there may not be that much material left untold that would warrant another book. John le Carré and his wife, Jane, at the Berlin film festival, 2001. Photograph: Franziska Krug/Getty Images