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. He donated his archive of personal papers, letters and manuscripts (“filling the space of a Cornish barn”) to the Bodleian library in Oxford. Called up for national service in 1949, Le Carré spent time as an intelligence officer in Graz, interviewing defectors from the wrong side of the iron curtain. He found no heroes even among the most daring escapees from East Germany. After two years, his father persuaded Lincoln College, Oxford, to allow his son to be interviewed, although the college had already filled its quota for freshers, and he was accepted to read modern languages in 1952.

John le Carré | Books | The Guardian John le Carré | Books | The Guardian

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 son by his first marriage, the journalist Tim Cornwell, collected and selected these letters. He himself died just before publication, unexpectedly, aged 59. 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.David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, at home with his sons Stephen, left, and Simon, 1964. Photograph: Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images James Bond, on the other hand, breaks no such Communist principles. You know him well. He is the hyena who stalks the capitalist deserts, he is an identifiable antagonist, sustained by capital and kept in good heart by the charms of a materialist society; he is a chauvinist, an unblinking patriot who makes espionage exciting. Bond on his magic carpet takes us away from moral doubt, banishes perplexity with action, morality with duty. Above all, he has the one piece of equipment without which not even his formula would work: an entirely evil enemy. First, there is the subject matter. You would expect a celebrated novelist to have lived at the centre of things and to have been greatly engaged in the disputes of his time. Not at all. Almost all of the letters are about trivial things such as “I had a mild argument with X”, or are literally admin, like “thank you so much for your kind gift, it would be good to see you soon”. I was amazed that Le Carre never seems to have commented on current affairs; remarkably, the great Cold War novelist doesn’t remark on the fall of the Berlin Wall! The only comments on major events are on Iraq and Brexit, where he adopts the annoying de-haut-en-bas tone of a parody liberal writer; there is no reasoned, intellectual engagement with the issues, but simply milquetoast whining about “isn’t this beastly and aren’t people stupid for believing politicians”. Of course, only fans of John le Carré will want to read this book. But for those of us who are, and who have read all his books, this one is catnip.

A Private Spy, edited by Tim Cornwell; The Secret Heart by

So this letter is to express, and thank you, for all that & more, and to renew my vows to you without qualification & to point to greater happiness in the future, & a growing love, filling & defining the spirit, a growing spirituality too, &, I believe, an intensifying harmony & mutual appreciation.

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How wonderful to have your letter, the contents of which I passed to Jonathan Powell at the BBC this morning. If possible, he was even happier than I was to hear that, in principle, you are enthusiastic to take on Smiley. Fry first wrote in 1991. ‘The English dam can withstand the pressure of 15 years of admiration and affection no longer,’ he said. ‘The only writer I’ve ever written to apart from yourself was PG Wodehouse.’ After reading The Night Manager, he wrote again.