I loved ‘Shakespeare in Love’, & loved you for writing it. It will last & last, my children & grandchildren already love it, it’s one of those perfect, lighthearted, profound works of art that actually increase the public’s awareness of its own cultural heritage. Very pompous of me, but true. And at the personal level, it was like a kind of doting Stoppard soliloquy on a balmy summer’s afternoon, all wit & affection & musing. I identified most naturally with Webster, of course, who was surely one of your most delicious conceits. Just wonderful. All, all wonderful – The erudition of many of these letters is what is so impressive. Just writing to a friend, he could not write a badly composed letter. Ex-spy and eminent British novelist John le Carré, pictured here in July 1993. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian Le Carré first met Stoppard when he was hired as the screenwriter for The Russia House in 1989. “I found Stoppard enchanting and extremely intelligent,” he told Alec Guinness. Is that a love letter? Does it say enough thank yous? Does it say enough that I am constantly lonely without you, even when I know I must go alone? That I want you? And wish to revive & intensify our love life too, to make more love & more journeys together? I hope it says all those things. And that I love you. And that, contrary to many bad signals in the past, I am pledged to you in love & constancy for always.

Engaging, insightful, wise, and gloriously witty correspondent John le Carre, pen name of David Cornwell, is all of these. He is the master storyteller who burst upon the world stage at the height of the Cold War with his superb and timely, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. In this well-selected trove of his letters to both famous and little-known correspondents, we discover a vein of gold. We discern, through the gimlet eye of his son, Tim Cornwell, an eclectic collection of letters about life, family, world events, personalities, writing, and humane insights. Where possible, Cornwell also includes the referenced letters and articles from those to whom he wrote. As le Carré’s own life filled with glitz, he was making his name by ridding the spy thriller of that very same quality. “The Spy Who Came In from the Cold” was a rebuke of jingoistic, Bond-like spy fictions. Men and women of conviction, on both sides, are swallowed up by a game of one-upmanship run by suits in London and Moscow. 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? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” After leaving the Foreign Office, he took his family to live in Crete, where he wrote A Small Town in Germany. It was a novel steeped in the hesitant British engagement in the European Economic Community, and the rise of demagogic rightwing populist movements in Germany. The world of British diplomacy has rarely seemed more threadbare, and in the aggressive, lower-class Alan Turner, Le Carré created a perfect foil for the self-deluded upper-class diplomats who proved easy prey for a mole.Literature was le Carré’s great cause. He considered being a writer of spy fiction a serious responsibility and knew intimately how the genre could lure people into illusions about the way the world, and the job itself, worked. 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.A. Henty and his ilk.” Le Carré’s own spies are bureaucrats, weary men in suits just trying to get a case in the win column. In “ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (1974), he turns a mole hunt into an office drama about ambition. When everyone is out for themselves and keeping secrets from one another, it becomes impossible to spot the traitor. What is a careerist, after all, if not a double agent? He found rich ambiguities in the world of private banking in Single & Single and of post-9/11 espionage in A Most Wanted Man (2008). The fate of the disaffected Muslim immigrant Issa Karpov, torn to shreds by competing intelligence agencies, British, American and German, did not fit into the emerging western discourses of terrorism. Alan Furst in the New York Times said A Most Wanted Man was Le Carré’s “strongest, most powerful novel” with “near perfect narrative pace”. The diatribes against Tony Blair and the British role in the invasion of Iraq in Absolute Friends (2003) were more enthusiastically received in Britain than in the US. Le Carré’s CV became more interesting in the years after 1958. Officially, he qualified for a late entrants’ scheme at the Foreign Office, and in 1961 was sent to the Bonn embassy. He made frequent visits to Berlin in that summer, and accompanied Germans who attracted the attention of the Foreign Office on visits to Britain. He continued to scribble away at his novels, until the success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold enabled him to resign. On that trip to Southeast Asia, le Carré was researching what would become The Honourable Schoolboy, about a British agent named Jerry Westerby. In the process of unmasking a Soviet intelligence operation in Asia, Westerby’s loyalties shift from his government to a woman. Still, he does the work. Pulling a thread that leads him through war-ravaged Laos to Thailand, Westerby ends up at an American military base just as Saigon falls.

Some actors can act intelligent. Others are intelligent and come over dull, because of some mannerism which gets in the way. And a very few are intelligent and convey it: in Tinker Tailor, this gift will be pure gold, because it gives such base to the other things – the solitude, the moral concern, the humanity of Smiley – all, because of the intelligence of his perceptions, grow under our eyes and in your care.

I couldn’t stop reading. Here was a man working things out through his writing, trying to make sense of forces that could be soul-crushing—particularly, in this case, for people on the inside. 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. This tie was given to me by my wife when I went to lunch with Mrs. Thatcher. Its colours were aptly chosen: the deep blue of Mrs. Thatcher’s convictions, shot with the intermittent red of my own frail socialism, and an insipid yellowish colour which I am afraid says much about my moral courage. 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. He appeared to be a romantic partner almost entirely comprised, in the modern parlance, of red flags. But some of his more preposterous behaviour as a lover – the mawkish devotions, the extravagant gifts, the sudden cooling of affection – do indeed speak of someone monstrously unhappy; someone, perhaps, who never felt quit

Cornwell would later proclaim himself, and his greatest creation, George Smiley, as keen supporters of the European Union, and all its works. In what must be by far Cornwell’s worst book, A Legacy of Spies, he somehow resurrects George Smiley (who must by then have been at least a hundred years old) in the pleasing German town of Freiburg-im-Breisgau. There, the ancient spy declares that his whole life has in fact been dedicated to “Europe.” “I’m a European. . . . If I had a mission . . . it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe.” In the light of this piety, it is amusing to find Cornwell writing in 1969 to a fellow spy, John Margetson, about how the sales of A Small Town in Germany to the “Frogs and Krauts” are “quite satisfactory.” Cornwell’s son, Tim, who so very sadly died just as he had finished editing these letters, is presumably the author of a prissy footnote which explains that such expressions “were very common in Britain in the 1960s” and that his father “often used slang terms to refer to various nationalities from time to time.” Of course he did. That is what Englishmen of his class and generation were like, before we all reformed ourselves to suit the new internationalist age. Alas for the footnote, Cornwell has a go at foreigners yet again, and twenty years later, far from the 1960s. He does so in a 1989 letter to Sir Alec Guinness—describing “the Frogs” as “extremely jumpy” over the collapse of the Soviet empire. Certainly, Larkin’s own copious letters have ensured that what survives of him is a picture of a resentful, emotionally constipated misanthrope with unpalatable opinions – and that’s after 30 volumes of his private papers were shredded at his instruction, so we can only imagine what was in those. And, of course, we do. There’s always a sense of outrage at the idea of a writer’s words being destroyed to keep them from the public, even (especially) when it’s the author’s own decision, as if we, the readers, had a God-given right to scrutinise their every utterance. He is on your side, not mine. Now that you have honoured the qualities which created him, it is only a matter of time before you recruit him. Believe me, you have set the stage: the Russian Bond is on his way. John le Carré's home in Cornwall, England which was recently put up for sale. Image sourced from RightMove Co. UK. [Note: Links were working as of October 3, 2023. Image and link may no longer be available once the house is sold.] I betrayed you, you say,” rages Cornwell the retired informer. But Cornwell doesn’t accept this charge. He even complains, hilariously, that Mitchell sees himself as the innocent high-minded victim (how could he have formed this impression, one wonders?). Then, plainly in answer to a question from Mitchell, he asks: “What did I know to betray? What did you know or do that was betrayable? What did I tell my ‘masters’?” There are, presumably, files somewhere which would clear this up. But Cornwell asserts ludicrously that he expects he told his masters that Mitchell was “a good man,” wisely adding, in case the documents ever came to light, as such things sometimes do, “I forget, and so I am sure did they.”The Naive and Sentimental Lover was poorly received. (“The book is a disastrous failure” – TLS.) Reviewers and readers knew what kind of book they wanted from Le Carré, and he was henceforth ruefully prepared to accept the reading public’s judgment.

He toyed with the idea of writing an autobiography long before the publication of The Pigeon Tunnel, more an engaging collection of reminiscences than an exploration of his inner life – what was left out of his memoirs was striking. Yet the chapter titled Son of the Author’s Father, first published as In Ronnie’s Court in the New Yorker in 2002, is a troubled, brilliant and unforgettable portrait of his parents. His father’s judgment of other people, he wrote, “depended entirely on how much they respected him”. The author with Gary Oldman at the premiere of ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, London 2011. Photograph: WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy The Spy Who Came in from the Cold announced a new voice in the rich British tradition of espionage writing. Nothing in Le Carré’s previous novels had suggested he had the skill to create such a tense and richly nuanced portrayal of an espionage operation. It remains the most perfectly plotted of his books. T wo years after his death, we now have a voluminous collection of le Carré’s letters, assembled by his son Tim Cornwell and published late last year: A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré. Through his correspondence, we learn a lot about le Carré’s habits as a writer. There are literary feuds, frustrations with critics, and glimpses into how some of his books became successful film and television productions (and how some didn’t). Despite his success, you get the sense that le Carré never let go of his insecurities about being taken seriously as a novelist; we see him seeking—and reveling in—the approval of writers such as Graham Greene, Philip Roth, and Tom Stoppard. Clearly, he wanted to be known as more than a spy or a spy novelist. Le Carre' was keenly aware of the money he was making and how it was being made. He did not stand aside when it came to making money, and a lot of his earthly endeavors involved activities that were very lucrative, namely revenues from movies and TV serialization of his written product.

He appeared to be a romantic partner almost entirely comprised, in the modern parlance, of red flags. But some of his more preposterous behaviour as a lover – the mawkish devotions, the extravagant gifts, the sudden cooling of affection – do indeed speak of someone monstrously unhappy; someone, perhaps, who never felt quite right in his own skin, and had to invent his way out of it.