Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. 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. His sons Simon and Stephen formed a production company in 2010 to make adaptations of his work a family business. John le Carré understood what, for all its moral failings, a career in intelligence represented for many: a good, stable government job.

She had been delighted by the progressive views he expressed, especially his disparagement of empire. Spencer Churchill (aged 16) [descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt and a son of the tenth duke of Marlborough] tells me that he spends his evenings with father glued to the television. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. View image in fullscreen The author with Gary Oldman at the premiere of ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, London 2011.We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. When everyone is out for themselves and keeping secrets from one another, it becomes impossible to spot the traitor. 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. There, with the Vietcong winning the war, he reread The Quiet American, a 1955 novel that foreshadowed America’s defeat through a piercing story of American hubris.

He marched against war in Iraq and described Tony Blair as “a mendacious little show-off … fucking up the world in his Noddy car”. Out of the secret world I once knew,” he explained in “The Pigeon Tunnel,” “I have tried to make a theater for the larger worlds we inhabit. 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”. If the fire’s a bit low sometimes, that’s bloody age and a lot of family stuff I won’t bore you with.Bond on his magic carpet takes us away from moral doubt, banishes perplexity with action, morality with duty. By turns intimate and comic, tender and clear-sighted A Private Spy offers a rare and illuminating portrait of one of the great figures of our times. He had been recruited by British intelligence two years earlier while studying German at the University of Bern. The high literary references are unusual: he was more of a Wodehouse man and read with painful slowness, in part because of dyslexia.

Beginning with The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), the second installment in the Karla trilogy set largely in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, le Carré’s novels became journalistic enterprises. His letters reveal just how much the United Kingdom and the United States had let him down by the end of his life. This method of communication incurred delays, and the intervals between posting a letter to the other side of the world and receiving a response led to several misunderstandings. His mother left them when he was 5 years old, so young David Cornwell, as was his birth name, was enlisted as his father’s accomplice. He had been in Bern, on leave from his British boarding school, with the intention of reading Goethe, not Soviet communiques.For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. Now spies were “craven”, allowing the world to be led by “a handful of jingoistic adventurers and imperialist fantasists, backed by a lot of dark money and manipulation: populism led from above”.