John le Carré

David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931 – 12 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré (/ləˈkæreɪ/ lə-KARR-ay),^[1] was a British author,^[2] best known for his espionage novels, many of which were successfully adapted for film or television. A "sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer",^[3] he is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).^[4] Near the end of his life, le Carré became an Irish citizen.

John le Carré
Le Carré in Hamburg, 2008
Born	David John Moore Cornwell (1931-10-19)19 October 1931 Poole, England
Died	12 December 2020(2020-12-12) (aged 89) Truro, England
Occupation	Novelist intelligence officer
Citizenship	United Kingdom Ireland (c. 2020)
Education	University of Bern Lincoln College, Oxford (BA)
Genre	Spy fiction
Notable works	The Spy Who Came in from the Cold Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy The Honourable Schoolboy Smiley's People The Little Drummer Girl A Perfect Spy The Night Manager The Tailor of Panama The Constant Gardener
Spouse	Alison Sharp ​ ​ (m. 1954; div. 1971)​ Valerie Eustace ​ ​ (m. 1972)​
Children	4, including Nicholas
Relatives	Anthony Cornwell (brother) Rupert Cornwell (half-brother) Charlotte Cornwell (half-sister)
Signature
Website
Official website

Le Carré's third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller, was adapted as an award-winning film, and remains one of his best-known works. This success allowed him to leave MI6 to become a full-time author.^[5] His other novels that have been adapted for film or television include The Looking Glass War (1965), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1979), The Little Drummer Girl (1983), The Russia House (1989), The Night Manager (1993), The Tailor of Panama (1996), The Constant Gardener (2001), A Most Wanted Man (2008) and Our Kind of Traitor (2010). Philip Roth said that A Perfect Spy (1986) was "the best English novel since the war".^[3]

Early life and education

David John Moore Cornwell was born on 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England, son of^[6][7] Ronald Thomas Archibald (Ronnie) Cornwell (1905–1975),^[8][9] and Olive Moore Cornwell (née Glassey, 1906–1989). His older brother, Tony (1929–2017), was an advertising executive and county cricketer (for Dorset), who later lived in the United States.^[10][11] His younger half-sister was the actress Charlotte Cornwell (1949–2021), and his younger half-brother, Rupert Cornwell (1946–2017), was a former Washington bureau chief for The Independent.^[12][13] Cornwell had little early memory of his mother, who had left their family home when he was five years old. His maternal uncle was Liberal MP Alec Glassey.^[14] When Cornwell was 21 years old, Glassey gave him the address in Ipswich where his mother was living; mother and son reunited at Ipswich railway station, at her written invitation, following Cornwell's initial letter of reconciliation.^[15][16]

Cornwell's father — who escaped from his "orthodox but repressive upbringing"^[17] as son of "a respectable nonconformist bricklayer who became a house builder and mayor of Poole"^[18][19] — had been jailed for insurance fraud and was a known associate of the Kray twins. The family was continually in debt. The father–son relationship has been described as "difficult".^[15] The Guardian reported that Le Carré recalled that he had been "beaten up by his father and grew up mostly starved of affection after his mother abandoned him at the age of five".^[4] Rick Pym, a scheming con man and the father of A Perfect Spy protagonist Magnus Pym, was based on Ronnie. When his father died in 1975, Cornwell paid for a memorial funeral service but did not attend, a plot point repeated in A Perfect Spy.^[15]

Cornwell's schooling began at St Andrew's Preparatory School, near Pangbourne, Berkshire, and continued at Sherborne School.^[20] He grew unhappy with the typically harsh English public school regime of the time and disliked his disciplinarian housemaster. He left Sherborne early to study foreign languages at the University of Bern from 1948 to 1949.^[21][20] In 1950, he was called up for National Service and served in the Intelligence Corps of the British Army garrisoned in Allied-occupied Austria, working as a German language interrogator of people who had crossed the Iron Curtain to the West. In 1952, he returned to England to study at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he worked covertly for the Security Service, MI5, spying on far-left groups for information about possible Soviet agents. During his studies, he was a member of The Gridiron Club and a college dining society known as The Goblin Club.^[21]

When his father was declared bankrupt in 1954, Cornwell left Oxford to teach at Millfield Preparatory School;^[14] however, a year later, he returned to Oxford, and graduated in 1956 with a First-Class degree in Modern Languages with a German Literature concentration. He then taught French and German at Eton College for two years, becoming an MI5 officer in 1958.^[20]

Work in security services

He ran agents, conducted interrogations, tapped telephone lines and effected break-ins.^[22] Encouraged by Lord Clanmorris (who wrote crime novels as "John Bingham"), and while being an active MI5 officer, Cornwell began writing his first novel, Call for the Dead (1961). Cornwell identified Lord Clanmorris as one of two models for George Smiley, the spymaster of the Circus, the other being Vivian H. H. Green.^[23] As a schoolboy, Cornwell first met the latter when Green was the Chaplain and Assistant Master at Sherborne School (1942–51). The friendship continued after Green's move to Lincoln College, where he tutored Cornwell.^[24]

In 1960, Cornwell transferred to MI6, the foreign-intelligence service, and worked under the cover of Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn. He was later transferred to Hamburg as a political consul.^[20] There, he wrote the detective story A Murder of Quality (1962) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), as "John le Carré"—a pseudonym required because Foreign Office staff were forbidden to publish under their own names.^[25][26] The meaning of the pseudonym is ambiguous: he sometimes said he had seen "le Carré" on a storefront, and later said he couldn't remember an origin.^[27] When translated, "le carré" means "the square".^[27]

In 1964, le Carré's career as an intelligence officer came to an end as the result of the betrayal of British agents' covers to the KGB by Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent, one of the Cambridge Five.^[21][28] Le Carré depicted and analysed Philby as the upper-class traitor, codenamed "Gerald" by the KGB, the mole hunted by George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).^[29][15]

Writing

Le Carré's first two novels, Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962), are mystery fiction. Each features a retired spy, George Smiley, investigating a death; in the first book, the apparent suicide of a suspected communist, and in the second volume, a murder at a boys' public school. Although Call for the Dead evolves into an espionage story, Smiley's motives are more personal than political.^[30] Le Carré's third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works; following its publication, he left MI6 to become a full-time writer. Although le Carré had intended The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as an indictment of espionage as morally compromised, audiences widely viewed its protagonist, Alec Leamas, as a tragic hero. In response, le Carré's next book, The Looking Glass War, was a satire about an increasingly deadly espionage mission which ultimately proves pointless.^[31][32]

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People (the Karla trilogy) brought Smiley back as the central figure in a sprawling espionage saga depicting his efforts first to root out a mole in the Circus and then to entrap his Soviet rival and counterpart, code-named 'Karla'. The trilogy was originally meant to be a long-running series that would find Smiley dispatching agents after Karla all around the world. Smiley's People marked the last time Smiley featured as the central character in a le Carré story, although he brought the character back in The Secret Pilgrim^[33] and A Legacy of Spies.^[34]

A Perfect Spy (1986), which chronicles the boyhood moral education of Magnus Pym and how it leads to his becoming a spy, is the author's most autobiographical espionage novel, reflecting the boy's very close relationship with his con man father.^[35] Biographer LynnDianne Beene describes the novelist's own father, Ronnie Cornwell, as "an epic con man of little education, immense charm, extravagant tastes, but no social values".^[36][6] Le Carré reflected that "writing A Perfect Spy is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised".^[37] He also wrote a semi-autobiographical work, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), as the story of a man's midlife existential crisis.^[38]

Italian cover of The Russia House (1989)

With the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, le Carré's writing shifted to the portrayal of the new multilateral world. His first completely post-Cold War novel, The Night Manager (1993), deals with drug and arms smuggling in the world of Latin American drug lords, secretive Caribbean banking entities and corrupt Western officials.^[39][40]

His final novel, Silverview, was published posthumously in 2021.

Themes

Most of le Carré's books are spy stories set during the Cold War (1945–91) and portray British Intelligence agents as unheroic political functionaries, aware of the moral ambiguity of their work and engaged more in psychological than physical drama.^[41] While "[espionage] was the genre that earned him fame...he used it as a platform to explore larger ethical problems and the human condition". The insight he demonstrated led "many fellow authors and critics [to regard] him as one of the finest English-language novelists of the twentieth century."^[42] His writing explores "human frailty—moral ambiguity, intrigue, nuance, doubt, and cowardice".^[43]

The fallibility of Western democracy – and of its secret services – is a recurring theme, as are suggestions of a possible east–west moral equivalence.^[41] Characters experience little of the violence typically encountered in action thrillers and have very little recourse to gadgets. Much of the conflict is internal, rather than external and visible.^[41] The recurring character George Smiley, who plays a central role in five novels and appears as a supporting character in four more, was written as an "antidote" to James Bond, a character le Carré called "an international gangster" rather than a spy and who he felt should be excluded from the canon of espionage literature.^[44] In contrast, he intended Smiley, who is an overweight, bespectacled bureaucrat who uses cunning and manipulation to achieve his ends, as an accurate depiction of a spy.^[45]

Le Carré's "writing entered intelligence services themselves. He popularized the term 'mole'...and other language that has become intelligence vernacular on both sides of the Atlantic — 'honeytrap', 'scalphunter', 'lamplighter' to name a few."^[43] However, in his first tweet as MI6's chief, Richard Moore revealed the agency's "complicated relationship with the author: He urged would-be Smileys not to apply to the service."^[43]

Other writing, film cameos

Le Carré records a number of incidents from his period as a diplomat in his autobiographical work, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016), which include escorting six visiting German parliamentarians to a London brothel^[46] and translating at a meeting between a senior German politician and Harold Macmillan.^[47]

As a journalist, le Carré wrote The Unbearable Peace (1991), a nonfiction account of Brigadier Jean-Louis Jeanmaire (1911–1992), the Swiss Army officer, who spied for the Soviet Union from 1962 until 1975.^[48]

Credited under his pen name, le Carré appears as an extra in the 2011 film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, among the guests at the Christmas party in several flashback scenes. He also appears, in uncredited cameo roles, as a museum usher in the 2016 movie, Our Kind of Traitor, and in the 2016 BBC TV production, The Night Manager, as a restaurant diner.

Politics

Threats to democracy

In 2017, le Carré expressed concerns over the future of liberal democracy, saying: "I think of all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it's contagious, it's infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There's an encouragement about".^[49] He later wrote that the end of the Cold War had left the West without a coherent ideology, in contrast to the "notion of individual freedom, of inclusiveness, of tolerance – all of that we called anti-communism" prevailing during that time.^[50]

Le Carré opposed both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, arguing that their desire to seek or maintain their countries' superpower status caused an impulse "for oligarchy, the dismissal of the truth, the contempt, actually, for the electorate and for the democratic system".^[51] Le Carré compared Trump's tendency to dismiss the media as "fake news" to the Nazi book burnings, and wrote that the United States is "heading straight down the road to institutional racism and neo-fascism".^[52][53]

In le Carré's 2019 novel Agent Running in the Field, one of the novel's characters refers to Trump as "Putin's shithouse cleaner" who "does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can't do for himself". The novel's narrator describes Boris Johnson as "a pig-ignorant foreign secretary". He says Russia is moving "backwards into her dark, delusional past", with Britain following a short way behind.^[54] Le Carré later said that he believed the novel's plotline, involving the U.S. and British intelligence services colluding to subvert the European Union, to be "horribly possible".^[53]

Brexit

Le Carré was an outspoken advocate of European integration and sharply criticised Brexit.^[55] Le Carré criticised Brexit advocates such as Boris Johnson (whom he referred to as a "mob orator"), Dominic Cummings and Nigel Farage in interviews, claiming that their "task is to fire up the people with nostalgia [and] with anger". He further opined in interviews: "What really scares me about nostalgia is that it's become a political weapon. Politicians are creating a nostalgia for an England that never existed, and selling it, really, as something we could return to", adding that, with "the demise of the working class we saw also the demise of an established social order, based on the stability of ancient class structures".^[53][56] On the other hand, he said that in the Labour Party "they have this Leninist element and they have this huge appetite to level society."^[57]

On Brexit, le Carré did not mince his words, comparing it to the 1956 Suez crisis, which confirmed post-imperial Britain's loss of global power. "This is without doubt the greatest catastrophe and the greatest idiocy that Britain has perpetrated since the invasion of Suez", le Carré said of Brexit. "Nobody is to blame but the Brits themselves – not the Irish, not the Europeans." "The idea, to me, that at the moment we should imagine we can substitute access to the biggest trade union in the world with access to the American market is terrifying", he said.^[58][59][60]

Speaking to The Guardian in 2019, he commented: "I've always believed, though ironically it's not the way I've voted, that it's compassionate conservatism that in the end could, for example, integrate the private schooling system. If you do it from the left you will seem to be acting out of resentment; do it from the right and it looks like good social organisation." Le Carré also said: "I think my own ties to England were hugely loosened over the last few years. And it's a kind of liberation, if a sad kind."^[53]

US invasion of Iraq

In January 2003, two months prior to the invasion, The Times published le Carré's essay "The United States Has Gone Mad" criticising the buildup to the Iraq War and President George W. Bush's response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, calling it "worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War" and "beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams".^[61][62] Le Carré participated in the London protests against the Iraq War. He said the war resulted from the "politicisation of intelligence to fit the political intentions" of governments and "How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history".^[63][64]

He was critical of Tony Blair's role in taking Britain into the Iraq War, saying: "I can't understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretences has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed."^[63]

Iran

Le Carré was critical of Western governments' policies towards Iran. He said that Iran's actions are a response to being "encircled by nuclear powers" and by the way in which "we ousted Mosaddeq through the CIA and the Secret Service here across the way and installed the Shah and trained his ghastly secret police force in all the black arts, the SAVAK".^[63]

Le Carré feuded with Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses, stating: "Nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity".^[65]

Israel

In a 1998 interview with Douglas Davis, Le Carré described Israel as "the most extraordinary carnival of human variety that I have ever set eyes on, a nation in the process of re-assembling itself from the shards of its past, now Oriental, now Western, now secular, now religious, but always anxiously moralizing about itself, criticizing itself with Maoist ferocity, a nation crackling with debate, rediscovering its past while it fought for its future." He declared: "No nation on earth was more deserving of peace—or more condemned to fight for it."^[66]

Personal life

In 1954, Cornwell married Alison Ann Veronica Sharp. They had three sons: Simon, Stephen and Timothy;^[7] they divorced in 1971.^[67] In 1972, Cornwell married Valerie Jane Eustace, a book editor with Hodder & Stoughton^[68] who collaborated with him behind the scenes.^[69] They had a son, Nicholas, who writes as Nick Harkaway.^[70] Le Carré lived in St Buryan, Cornwall, for more than 40 years; he owned a mile of cliff near Land's End.^[71] The house, Tregiffian Cottage, was put up for sale in 2023 for £3 million.^[72] Le Carré also owned a house in Gainsborough Gardens in Hampstead in north London.^[73][74]

Le Carré was so disillusioned by the 2016 Brexit vote to leave the European Union that he secured Irish citizenship. In a BBC documentary broadcast in 2021, le Carré's son Nicholas revealed that his father's disillusionment with modern Britain, and Brexit in particular, had driven him to embrace his Irish heritage and become an Irish citizen. At the time of his death, le Carré's friend, the novelist John Banville, confirmed that the writer had researched his family roots in Inchinattin, near Rosscarbery, County Cork, and that he had applied for an Irish passport, to which he was entitled having completed the process of becoming an Irish citizen and having Irish ancestry through his maternal grandmother, Olive Wolfe.^[58][59][60] His neighbour and friend Philippe Sands recalled:

He became an Irishman through his maternal grandmother. And it was very, very moving, I have to say, to arrive at the place of the memorial to find an Irish flag and only an Irish flag. He had really in the last years, grown very disillusioned with what had happened to Britain and the United Kingdom.^[75]

Le Carré died at Royal Cornwall Hospital, Truro, on 12 December 2020, aged 89.^[76][77] An inquest completed in June 2021 concluded that le Carré died after sustaining a fall at his home.^[78] His wife Valerie died on 27 February 2021, two months after her husband, at age 82.^[79]

In 2023, biographer Adam Sisman in The Secret Life of John le Carré identified 11 women with whom le Carré had affairs during his second marriage.^[80]

Le Carré's son Timothy died on 31 May 2022 at the age of 59, shortly after he finished editing A Private Spy, a collection of his father's letters.^[81]

Selected bibliography

Main article: John le Carré bibliography

Novels

• Call for the Dead (1961), OCLC 751303381
• A Murder of Quality (1962), OCLC 777015390
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), OCLC 561198531
• The Looking Glass War (1965), OCLC 752987890
• A Small Town in Germany (1968), ISBN 0-143-12260-6
• The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), ISBN 0-143-11975-3
• Smiley Versus Karla trilogy
  • Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), ISBN 0-143-12093-X
  • The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), ISBN 0-143-11973-7
  • Smiley's People (1979), ISBN 0-340-99439-8
• The Little Drummer Girl (1983), ISBN 0-143-11974-5
• A Perfect Spy (1986), ISBN 0-143-11976-1
• The Russia House (1989), ISBN 0-743-46466-4
• The Secret Pilgrim (1990), ISBN 0-345-50442-9
• The Night Manager (1993), ISBN 0-345-38576-4
• Our Game (1995), ISBN 0-345-40000-3
• The Tailor of Panama (1996), ISBN 0-345-42043-8
• Single & Single (1999), ISBN 0-743-45806-0
• The Constant Gardener (2001), ISBN 0-743-28720-7
• Absolute Friends (2003), ISBN 0-670-04489-X
• The Mission Song (2006), ISBN 0-340-92199-4
• A Most Wanted Man (2008), ISBN 1-416-59609-7
• Our Kind of Traitor (2010), ISBN 0-143-11972-9
• A Delicate Truth (2013), ISBN 0-143-12531-1
• A Legacy of Spies (2017), ISBN 978-0-735-22511-4^[82]
• Agent Running in the Field (2019), ISBN 1984878875
• Silverview (2021), ISBN 9780241550069^[83]

Archive

In 2010, le Carré donated his literary archive to the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The initial 85 boxes of material deposited included handwritten drafts of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Constant Gardener. The library hosted a public display of these and other items to mark World Book Day in March 2011.^[84][85]

Awards and honours

• 1963, British Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold^[86]
• 1964, Somerset Maugham Award for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold^[87]
• 1965, Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold^[88]
• 1977, British Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for The Honourable Schoolboy^[86]
• 1977, James Tait Black Memorial Prize Fiction Award for The Honourable Schoolboy^[89]
• 1983, Japan Adventure Fiction Association Prize for The Little Drummer Girl^[90]
• 1984, Honorary Fellow Lincoln College, Oxford^[67]
• 1984, Mystery Writers of America Edgar Grand Master^[88]
• 1988, Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger Lifetime Achievement Award^[91]
• 1988, The Malaparte Prize, Italy^[67]
• 1990, Honorary degree, University of Exeter^[92]
• 1990, Helmerich Award of the Tulsa Library Trust.^[93]
• 1996, Honorary degree, University of St. Andrews^[94]
• 1997, Honorary degree, University of Southampton^[95]
• 1998, Honorary degree, University of Bath^[96]
• 2005, Crime Writers' Association Dagger of Daggers for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold^[97]
• 2005, Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, France^[67]
• 2008, honorary doctorate, University of Bern^[98]
• 2011, Goethe Medal, awarded by the Goethe Institute^[99][100]
• 2012, Honorary degree of Doctor of Letters, University of Oxford^[101]
• 2020, Olof Palme Prize^[102] – le Carré donated the US$100,000 prize money to Médecins Sans Frontières.^[103]

In addition in 2008, The Times ranked le Carré 22nd on its list of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945".^[104]

Citations

1. "Say How: I–L". Library of Congress. National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. November 2019. Archived from the original on 19 September 2018. Retrieved 28 May 2018.
2. "John le Carré: Irish citizenship a 'small salute' to my grandmother". BBC News. 16 December 2020. Retrieved 8 June 2024.
3. Garner, Dwight (14 December 2020). "John le Carré, a Master of Spy Novels Where the Real Action Was Internal". The New York Times. Retrieved 26 October 2022.
4. Harding, Luke (2 September 2016). "John le Carré: I was beaten by my father, abandoned by my mother". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 October 2022.
5. Kerridge, Jake (14 December 2020). "How John le Carré's early miseries led to the great masterpieces". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 12 January 2022. Retrieved 2 March 2021.
6. "Obituary: John le Carré". BBC News. 13 December 2020. Archived from the original on 14 December 2020. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
7. Homberger, Eric (14 December 2020). "John le Carré obituary". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 14 December 2020. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
8. GRO Register of Births: Dec 1905 5a 231 Poole – Ronald Thomas A. Cornwell
9. "Why John le Carré's father went to jail (and his links to Dorset)". Daily Echo [Bournemouth Echo]. 15 August 2011. Retrieved 26 October 2022.
10. Lelyveld, Joseph (16 March 1986). "Le Carré's Toughest Case". The New York Times Magazine. Archived from the original on 28 October 2018. Retrieved 30 January 2020.
11. Gwinn, Mary Ann (25 March 1999). "Scoundrels and Sons – Author John Le Carre Digs Deep in His Own Past for the Themes of His Work". The Seattle Times. Archived from the original on 14 December 2020. Retrieved 30 January 2020.
12. "Rupert Cornwell". The Independent. Archived from the original on 10 September 2014. Retrieved 2 February 2019.
13. "Espionage: The Perfect Spy Story". Time. 25 September 1989. Retrieved 14 December 2020. (subscription required)
14. "Scholar, linguist, story-teller, spy..." The Guardian. 17 July 1993. Archived from the original on 9 September 2017. Retrieved 3 July 2017.
15. Brennan, Zoe (2 April 2011). "What Does John Le Carré Have to Hide?". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 18 November 2011. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
16. Lawson, Mark (2008). "Mark Lawson Talks to John Le Carre BBC FOUR". BBC iPlayer. Retrieved 31 May 2021.
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18. Homberger, Eric (14 December 2020). "John le Carré obituary". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 13 June 2024.
19. "Cornwell, David John Moore (h 48) – John le Carré". The Old Shirburnian Society. 15 December 2020. Retrieved 13 June 2024.
20. "Cornwell, David John Moore, (John Le Carré), (19 Oct. 1931–12 Dec. 2020), writer". WHO'S WHO & WHO WAS WHO. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.u11935. ISBN 978-0-19-954088-4. Retrieved 15 April 2021.
21. Anthony, Andrew (1 November 2009). "Observer Profile: John le Carré: A Man of Great Intelligence". The Observer. Archived from the original on 18 August 2017. Retrieved 4 March 2010.
22. Ash, Timothy Garton (15 March 1999). "The Real le Carré". The New Yorker. Vol. 75, no. 3. pp. 36–45. Archived from the original on 14 December 2020. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
23. "The Reverend Vivian Green". The Daily Telegraph. 26 January 2005. Archived from the original on 13 November 2012. Retrieved 4 August 2011.
24. Singh, Anita (24 February 2011). "John le Carré: The Real George Smiley Revealed". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 22 March 2016. Retrieved 3 September 2016.
25. "John le Carré: Espionage writer dies aged 89". BBC News. 14 December 2020. Archived from the original on 13 December 2020. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
26. Lawless, Jill (13 December 2020). "Master spy writer John le Carre dies at 89". Boston Globe. Associated Press. Retrieved 27 January 2023. His first three novels were written while he was a spy, and his employers required him to publish under a pseudonym.
27. Adler-Bell, Sam (13 July 2023). "The Essential John le Carré". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 4 November 2023.
28. Plimpton, George (1997). "John le Carré, The Art of Fiction No. 149". The Paris Review. 143. Archived from the original on 15 May 2016. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
29. Morrison, Blake (11 April 1986). "Then and Now: John le Carre". Times Literary Supplement. Archived from the original on 14 December 2020. Retrieved 4 August 2011.
30. Tayler, Christopher (25 January 2007). "Belgravia Cockney". London Review of Books. 29 (2): 13–14. Archived from the original on 30 March 2010. Retrieved 4 March 2010.
31. Manning 2018, pp. 78, 90.
32. Duns, Jeremy (17 February 2020). "The Looking Glass War review by John le Carré—a classic for our deceitful times". The Times. p. 17. ProQuest 2359955748. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
33. Manning 2018, p. 183.
34. Manning 2018, pp. 4–5.
35. Garner, Dwight (18 April 2013). "John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age (Published 2013)". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 13 December 2020. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
36. Beene 1992, p. 2.
37. Agence France-Presse. "John Le Carre Novels: A Selection". Barron's. Archived from the original on 14 December 2020. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
38. Cobbs 1998, p. 83.
39. Petski, Denise (5 March 2015). "Olivia Colman, Tom Hollander, Elizabeth Debicki Join AMC's The Night Manager". Deadline Hollywood. Archived from the original on 8 August 2020. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
40. "The Night Manager: le Carré's 'unexpected miracle'". The Telegraph. 19 February 2016. Archived from the original on 29 October 2020. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
41. Holcombe, Garan (2006). "Contemporary Writers". British Council. Archived from the original on 4 June 2011. Retrieved 4 March 2010.
42. Barber, Tony (14 December 2020). "John le Carré, author, 1931–2020". Financial Times. Retrieved 26 October 2022.
43. Walton, Calder (26 December 2020). "What Spies Really Think About John le Carré". Foreign Policy.
44. Singh, Anita (17 August 2010). "James Bond was a neo-fascist gangster, says John Le Carré". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 4 April 2018. Retrieved 3 April 2018.
45. Parker, James (26 October 2011). "The Anti–James Bond". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 29 June 2018. Retrieved 3 April 2018.
46. le Carré, John (2016). "Official visit". The Pigeon Tunnel. Stories from My Life. Viking. ISBN 978-0-241-97687-6.
47. le Carré, John (2016). "Fingers on the trigger". The Pigeon Tunnel. Stories from My Life. Penguin Books Limited. ISBN 978-0-241-97687-6. Archived from the original on 14 December 2020. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
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Sources

• Beene, Lynn Dianne (1992). John le Carré. New York: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 9780805770131.
• Cobbs, John L. (1998). Understanding John Le Carré. University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-57003-168-7.
• Manning, Toby (25 January 2018). John le Carré and the Cold War. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-350-03640-6.

Further reading

• Aronoff, Myron J. (1998). The Spy Novels of John le Carré: Balancing Ethics and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9780312299453. ISBN 9780312214821.
• Bruccoli, Matthew J.; Baughman, Judith S., eds. (2004). Conversations with John le Carré. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-57806-669-8.
• Dawson, Suleika (2022). The Secret Heart – John Le Carré: An Intimate Memoir. HarperCollins. ISBN 9780008533038.
• Sisman, Adam (2015). John le Carré: The Biography. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781408827932.

External links

• John le Carré at IMDb 
• Two interviews at NPR's Fresh Air
• John le Carré discography at Discogs
• Two letters at Leeds University Library
• Portraits of John le Carré at the National Portrait Gallery, London