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. In a now famous line, a British agent named Alec Leamas preaches to an idealistic young socialist: “What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? He spoke excellent German,” le Carré said, “and he always reminded us in German class, as everyone was demonising Germany with justice, that there was another Germany, an enduring one and a much older one and a wise and loveable Germany.

My love life has always been a disaster area,” he told his brother Tony, and worried, needlessly, how much the Sisman biography would expose. I had a few months left of health insurance, and I—who cannot swim—had just sent a rather pleading application to work as a translator on a salmon-fishing boat in the Russian Far East. 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. In any case, David Cornwell’s career as a spy ended the year after his breakthrough novel was published: Philby, it is widely believed, blew his cover.And when I moved on to other lives: to the Middle East, to Africa, and to Latin America, other people opened doors for me and I was again the beneficiary of kind strangers who became kind friends. Smiley was last seen in A Legacy of Spies (2017), in which the children of characters from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor make inquiries about what happened to their parents. He was sent to boarding school at the age of five, and it left him with a bitter feeling toward his country’s ruling institutions, even as he would remain thoroughly a creature of them.

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. In his reply, he thanked her for writing “so interestingly … I was very touched by all you had to say, and fascinated by many of your insights. Not by our country, which voted for a lot of things it didn’t want or understand, but by a handful of jingoistic adventurers and imperialist fantasists, backed by a lot of dark money and manipulation: populism led from above, when was it ever otherwise? The joy to me is how much of you is there …” For all his enthusing, it was clear to Susan that he felt awkward about recommending her to his publisher.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. I was supposed to be sitting at a bar, nursing my second shot of bourbon, flirting with the bartender and exuding the tousled sex appeal of someone who has not lived up to their potential. 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. As he saw it, the escapist glamour of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels only bolstered the communist image of the West as a playground of thrill-seeking hedonists trying to fill the void with empty sex and alcohol.