Published: 20 Oct 2023 Milli Vanilli to The Pigeon Tunnel: the seven best films to watch on TV this week Behind the little flags we wave, there are old faces weeping, and children mutilated by the fatuous conflicts of preachers. Mr. Voinov [a Soviet critic who reviewed A Spy Who Came In From The Cold], I suspect, smelt in my writing the greatest heresy of all: that there is no victory and no virtue in the Cold War, only a condition of human illness and a political misery. And so he called me its apologist (he might as well have called Freud a lecher).

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

I wish you were here – it is very beautiful. A small, unspoilt village, with a pub, a couple of shops and a group of houses with wooden walls and steep grey rooves. Cobbled streets, and the vigour and happiness of a real spring day. The river and the lake & the mountains. The fields look young and green, as if they were breathing in the warm sun and letting the wind run across them like spray over the side of a ship. It was a wonderful thing, but the more painful, when he died rather abruptly in December, to see her deprived of the other half of her way of thinking across five decades. She was casting around for who might be holding the part of herself that she had vested in him, looking for the rest of the process that was trying to continue in her – hence the search for the missing material, the determination to keep going, because to stop working was to die again.The author with Gary Oldman at the premiere of ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, London 2011. Photograph: WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy 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.

John le Carré - Penguin Books UK John le Carré - Penguin Books UK

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.John le Carré and his wife, Jane, at the Berlin film festival, 2001. Photograph: Franziska Krug/Getty Images So we loved each other, because actually that’s all we had, & we reacted off each other, towards & against each other, & we lived in each other’s skins, & revolted against the captivity, & the emptiness of the rest of our lives, and we learned sex too late like everything else, and we went our different ways, but probably they were ultimately very similar ways, which is another serious annoyance. Our father was a mad genes-bank, a truly wild card, and in my memory disgusting – still. I never mourned him, never missed him, I rejoiced at his death. Is that so awful? I don’t think so.