“There is no such thing as a former KGB man,” quipped Vladimir Putin. Perhaps there is no such thing as a former spy because it is a character type more than a profession. The meaning of “spy,” though, depends on political context. I once ran into an acquaintance who had retired from British Intelligence on a train in the United Kingdom. On the table in front of him was a heap of files. “I volunteered to serve on the governing board of a school,” he explained. “Your grandchild goes there?” I asked. “No, nor is it my old school,” he preempted my next thought. “They were looking for people with relevant experience, you know, committee work, plowing through files, that sort of thing.” He combed his white mustache and smiled contentedly.

If spies are bureaucrats and much of spy craft is conspiring with and against colleagues on committees and shuffling papers in and out of files (or retrieving information from and entering it into databases today), David Cornwell, alias John le Carré, is the bard of office politics and the Homer of interdepartmentalism. Many people find the secret world of spies, traitors, and assassins intriguing as an unrealistic imaginary world to escape into, as in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. But the intelligence community can also be depicted realistically as a bureaucracy. Many are familiar with dysfunctional bureaucracies where interdepartmental turf wars destroy organizations from within and deception is used to whitewash failure and incompetence. But what if the source of dysfunction is not narrow private interests that do not align with the broader goals of the organization, but deliberate malevolence? What if it is not spontaneous folly, but the deliberate destruction of an organization by a foreign secret agency? The answer is: Bureaucratic mythology.

Natural calamities happen. Mythology personalizes them by attributing them to gods and heroes. Elite blunders cause unintended disasters out of shortsightedness, ignorance of history and political reality, dogmatic dismissal of contradictory evidence, and so on. Yet it is much easier to believe that unintended consequences are the intended results of conspiracies. In the bureaucratic world there is one enclave where bad consequences are sometimes intended, conspiracies are common, and puppet masters do manipulate events from off-stage: the world of espionage. 

John le Carré has been a bureaucratic mythological realist for a long while. He invented a distinct pantheon of demi-gods and heroes, led by British and Soviet spymasters George Smiley and Karla, who are as humanly flawed as were the Greek gods. By design and historical luck, the themes of le Carré’s novels read as a myth-like commentary on current affairs: the Soviet infiltration of the British secret services and establishment, the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War and its aftermath in Southeast Asia, the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Lebanese Civil War, the corruption of Western elites in the aftermath of the Cold War, the rise of political Islam in the Caucasus, and the War on Terror. For example, Karla, the code name for the Soviet master spy who places moles in Western secret services, is a revolutionary fanatic who kills the mother of his own daughter for having doubts about the revolution during the Stalinist era. But in the Brezhnev era he brings about his own downfall when he smuggles their mentally ill daughter to Switzerland and embezzles funds in hard currency to finance her care. This mythic story personalizes the emergence of a Soviet ruling class, when the nomenklatura came to care for its children more than for the system. The KGB was indeed able to hide personal wealth in Swiss bank accounts. As in pagan mythology, there is bad in the good, and good in the bad. Karla is a fanatic who ruthlessly orders the killing of three people to protect the secret identity of his daughter in Switzerland, yet he breaks the rules of the Soviet system to care for his child. Smiley is a tolerant liberal, yet he ruthlessly blackmails Karla by threatening to expose the true identity of his innocent daughter and have her abandoned sick and destitute.

We live in an era in which the author has been resurrected as an object of interest, after his premature death at the hands of French-trained structuralist assassins. As it happens, David Cornwell’s biography offers insights into le Carré’s fiction. Over the years, Cornwell provided snippets about his past, but this is the first attempt at a biography, by Adam Sisman, who previously published biographies of English historians A. J. P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper. Sisman’s work was both facilitated and made more difficult by Cornwell’s cooperation. He interviewed Cornwell as he was spawning myths about le Carré; it was never quite clear who was talking, Cornwell about le Carré or vice versa. Sisman tried to compare le Carré’s memories with independent historical records and sources, but the records for Cornwell’s work at MI5 and MI6 are still covered by the Official Secrets Act. Sisman suggests that le Carré occasionally fell victim to false memories, especially in relation to people and institutions he despised by comparing what he said with written and oral sources.

Another challenge for any biographer of le Carré is how to approach the past forty years. By the mid-1970s Cornwell had settled down with his second wife in a large estate on the Cornish coast near the western tip of England, leading a private if not reclusive life. Apart from occasional study trips to the regions of the world where his plots unfolded, he has led vita contemplativa rather than vita activa. Sisman’s less-than-satisfactory approach to those decades is to outline the plot of each book in turn, then summarize reviews in the most important venues, mention an oral or written comment by a celebrity, some public mention or literary tiff that followed the publication, and conclude with sales figures and bestseller-list rankings. A more demanding approach could have been to write an intellectual biography that analyzed recurring themes and influences, and traced intellectual and political developments. We don’t have it.

The most interesting parts of the biography are about le Carré’s life before he became a full-time author following the success of his third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, in the mid-1960s. The most important influence on le Carré’s fiction was his father Ronald “Ronnie” Cornwell. Though neither Sisman nor Cornwell himself label Ronnie a “psychopath,” they describe behavior very close to the clinical psychological description of that personality disorder. Psychopaths lack the mental capacity to empathize. They observe people and infer what makes them tick. Psychopaths are highly manipulative; without consciences, they are ruthless in the pursuit of their passions, which for the most part include greed and the will to power. Since their approach is purely instrumental, they seek to manipulate, use, dominate, and intimidate others. When successful, they surround themselves with what le Carré called “a court” of people who have some psychological deficiency or weakness that they can manipulate to their gain. 

Ronnie Cornwell applied himself to finance and commerce and only once to politics when he ran unsuccessfully for Parliament. When he was not in jail he was swindling, conning, and constructing illegal financial schemes. Between bankruptcies, he could be prosperous. Olive, Ronnie’s first wife and David Cornwell’s mother, left when David was five years old. Olive’s decision to divorce Ronnie requires no explanation: The mystery is her decision to abandon her two sons to a character like Ronnie. So much did her abandonment haunt him that in A Perfect Spy, le Carré’s semi-autobiographical novel, his alter ego Magnus Pym’s mother disappears in a mental asylum. This was the wish-fulfilling fantasy. The reality was harsher: Olive ran away with a man whom she married after divorcing Ronnie, and evinced no interest in meeting her sons until they contacted her as adults. According to Sisman, whose source can only be le Carré himself, Ronnie and Olive later carried on an affair while being married to other spouses. Understandably, then, female characters in le Carré’s novels are usually incomprehensible or lacking in depth. Sisman attempts to defend his subject’s female characters by comparing them to Ian Fleming’s female characters, but that is, alas, a very low bar.

If le Carré’s women are distant, Ronnie is ubiquitous. The ruthless con artist unencumbered by moral scruples reappears not just as the semi-biographical Richard Theodore Pym in A Perfect Spy, but also as Tiger Single in Single & Single, Roper in The Night Manager, as a young man as Andy Osnard in The Tailor of Panama, briefly as the bankrupt father of the Little Drummer Girl, and as the dead Karpov in A Most Wanted Man. Another, even more frequently recurring tragic character who originated in Ronnie’s “court” is that of the old-fashioned upper-class decent Englishman, who embarks on a tragic quest for justice that ends with his death: Jerry Westerby in the Honorable School Boy, The Night Manager, and The Constant Gardener; Salvo in The Mission Song; and Toby Bell in A Delicate Truth. They are all variations on a character who, though conned and financially squeezed dry by Ronnie, developed some kind of dependence on him that led eventually to suicide. 

David Cornwell escaped these origins without going insane, but at a price. His ancestors were members of provincial commercial, political, and religious elites in the West of England. His grandfather was the mayor of Poole in southwest England and an uncle was a Liberal MP from Dorset, a respected businessman, and a pillar of his church. Ronnie focused his con artistry on the upper classes and London, essentially because that is where the money was. David and his older brother played the role of the “inside men,” helping him penetrate the upper class in order to fleece it. Thanks to expensive schooling, the boys lacked Ronnie’s provincialism in accent, manner, and religious non-conformist affiliation, helping him appear a respectable and trustworthy member of the elite. Unsurprisingly, Ronnie wanted them eventually to become lawyers. 

The Cornwell boys were sent out to Sherborne, a boarding school in Dorset founded in 1550. Though by David Cornwell’s account he hated it, it did the social trick and catapulted him into the ranks of the ruling classes by dint of his social networks, manners, and culture. Yet he could neither ignore nor forget how and at what price Ronnie bought his entry into the upper class. The gap between the traditional values of honor and service espoused by the school and the very different values of the father was compounded by the hypocrisy of the school, which kept pressing the family for money, tuition, and boarding fees. Ronnie paid irregularly, without concern for where he got the money. David, however, could not forget the tainted source of the fees, or the exploitation of innocent victims who sometimes could and sometimes could not afford to be fleeced. He became a spy within the upper class in Ronnie’s service and at Ronnie’s court in his own.

David Cornwell’s understandable reaction to all this was to do a “Tolstoy” and escape in the snow. Instead of completing his studies at Sherborne, he went to study German literature at the University of Bern. David knew Switzerland from travelling there with Ronnie, who met, greeted, and fleeced the rich on their winter skiing vacations. Swiss banking was also useful for Ronnie in circumventing the strict currency regulations in postwar Britain. David escaped to the one place abroad he knew, and it is no surprise that Switzerland in general and Bern in particular figure in his novels. In A Perfect Spy, le Carré referred to Switzerland as the natural home of the spy. In The Little Drummer Girl he observed more ironically that every prison has a room with plastic flowers and a picture of Switzerland. Bern’s luxury hotel, the Bellevue Palace, where David stayed for a single night in 1948, featured often in filmed adaptations of le Carré’s novels. 

Initially, Ronnie underwrote his stay. But after a few months, the funds dried up and David went to live in an attic on the poor side of town. He made ends meet working illegally as a waiter and, by his account, washing animals in the circus. Among his fellow students were a couple of older Germans who had experienced the war and then left the Russian zone of occupation that became the DDR. One of them may have been a spy for the East. Le Carré merged them to form the fictional character of Axel in A Perfect Spy. 

This explains some of the odd aspects of Axel’s character: He is a Sudeten German from Carlsbad/Karlovy Vary who fought on the German side in the war and then hid as an illegal immigrant in Switzerland. After le Carré’s alter ego, Magnus Pym, informs on him, he is deported to occupied Germany and thence to Communist Czechoslovakia, where the Communist friends of his dead socialist father who fought in Spain recruit him into the secret service. In reality, after the expulsion of three million Sudeten Germans in 1946, Czechoslovakia would not have admitted a Sudeten German. Axel would have ended up in Bavaria, not Prague. Even had Axel been a Czech national with a socialist father and service in the German army, he would have been lucky to survive the early 1950s. However, if Axel was German and the country he lived in after the war was East Germany, the story makes sense. 

Another geographic puzzle in A Perfect Spy is that Pym is stationed as an intelligence officer in Graz, in southern Austria, while he meets Axel on the Czechoslovak border, far to the north. Sisman’s biography provides the explanation: Cornwell spent much of his military service near Graz, mostly spying on the Soviet occupation zone in Austria and interrogating refugees. He had to fuse his experience with the plot about Axel. Axel had to be Czech rather than East German to fit the classical literary code for deciphering the plot, Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus, which takes place in Bohemia during the Thirty Years’ War. 

After a year in Switzerland, Cornwell returned to Britain to do his military service. His upper-class credentials as an old Sherborne boy propelled him to become an intelligence officer and then to read German at Oxford University. Ronnie was back to his old tricks when it came to paying the fees, but by the time he became insolvent David was sufficiently advanced at Oxford for the university to find a way to allow him to graduate. Sisman does not delve into the intellectual influence of Oxford on Cornwell. It could be that by the time he came up to Oxford he was already well-formed intellectually, having become fluent in German language and literature after the year in Bern and the service in Graz. It could also be that the Oxford dons of the time had little to offer him intellectually. 

Cornwell attended the inaugural lecture of W.H. Auden as a professor of poetry. In a reception afterwards, the poet of “The Age of Anxiety” fondled le Carré’s behind. “Do you do this?” asked the greatest poet of the English language. “I am afraid not,” replied the future master of British espionage literature. “Still, it’s nice to be fancied,” summed up Auden who “knew human folly like the back of his hand.” Le Carré used Auden’s line about “nice to be fancied” in Smiley’s People, and a few lines from Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” as the motto of The Honorable Schoolboy. 

Meanwhile, Vivian Green, the chaplain of Cornwell’s Lincoln College, Oxford, whom he knew from when Green was a chaplain and teacher at Sherborne, mentored him personally and provided the model for le Carré’s master spy, George Smiley. Smiley’s donnish manners make sense in this context, as well as his wife’s repeated infidelities and his own disinterest in other women: Vivian Green, Smiley’s model, was gay. 

During most of his time at Oxford, Cornwell worked for MI5. He pretended to be a leftist fellow traveler to infiltrate and inform on left-wing and communist student organizations. When the political and social elite of a country is recruited almost exclusively from one or two universities, they become an obvious and easy target for foreign spies. The British woke up to this reality too late, allowing the Soviets to recruit cohorts of spies, especially in the 1930s. Yet Cornwell’s counter-intelligence activities, at least to the extent reported, appear amateurish. One of Cornwell’s “targets” was Newton Garver, an American Quaker and Wittgensteinian who was a philosophy graduate student at the time. Garver was a classic pacifist, a conscientious objector with a specialty in civil disobedience. He spent time in jail for refusing to register for the draft and later refused to take the loyalty oath as a professor at SUNY Buffalo. A person as visible, outspoken, and public as Garver could never be a useful spy. In the Oxford context, however, British intelligence did not know what to make of him. Cornwell wondered if he was a CIA plant and searched his rooms for evidence. An early edition of the Philosophical Investigations must have been in view. All this could have been amusing had, at the same time, Kim Philby not been close to running MI6 on behalf of his Soviet masters. 

After graduation, Cornwell taught in public (that is, British for private) boarding schools for a few years, which provided the setting for A Murder of Quality, le Carré’s second novel and his only purely who-done-it detective story. Then he returned to MI5, pursuing domestic subversives in London for five years before working for MI6 for three years in Bonn, Hamburg, and West Berlin—locations that serve often as backgrounds to his plots. 

Cornwell married, had three children, and settled into a suburban existence within the modest means of a civil-service salary. During those years he published his first three novels and invented George Smiley. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold catapulted le Carré onto the bestsellers list and was made into a successful movie with Richard Burton. His next two books, The Looking Glass War and A Small Town in Germany, were spy satires, expanding on the incompetence, inner rivalries, and absurdities of intelligence agencies. These novels should be read in the Central European tradition of bureaucratic absurdist satires like Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities or Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk. Such satires, however, do not sell as well as mythic thrillers. The Looking Glass War was made into a movie in 1968 that seems today like a satire of a satire, a spy thriller version of Mel Brooks’s “Springtime for Hitler” number in The Producers.

While David Cornwell was still working for MI5, a personnel officer inquired whether he had yet gotten over his father. Fraudsters, like natural parasites, must ever seek newer hosts. Ronnie moved to more remote corners of the globe (including a stay at the Plaza Hotel in New York), assuming a variety of false identities. This was convenient for David, until he became wealthy, whereupon he became a mark for his father. Ronnie would show up unannounced in social contexts where his son would be too embarrassed to ignore him. He manipulated David’s friends and colleagues to pressure him to “reconcile” with his father and pay the bill, because Ronnie “put him through college.”

After quitting his day job and getting a divorce, David Cornwell fell into a series of odd friendships with libidinous, uninhibited, amoral, and eventually self-destructive characters: the novelist James Kennaway and the military historian, Tory politician, and pervert Alan Clark. Perhaps out of over-identification with Kennaway, Cornwell embarked on an affair with the man’s wife, a scenario that formed the basis of his novel The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. Clark swept Cornwell off his feet with his charismatic charm and manipulated Cornwell into lending him his penthouse bachelor apartment for trysts with underage girls. According to le Carré, when on one occasion Clark left the apartment bloodied, he demanded the keys back. It does not take much speculation to conclude that these men replaced Ronnie in David’s psyche. 

By the mid-1970s, with much of his wild oats sown, David had settled down with a second family. Ronnie was dead. The following 15 years were le Carré’s literary golden age. He wrote the best trilogy in the history of espionage literature, recounting the mythological struggle between the British master spy-runner George Smiley and Karla, his Soviet counterpart (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honorable School Boy, and Smiley’s People), and contributed new concepts and words to the English language such as “moles” for double agents and “tradecraft” for spying techniques. 

The Little Drummer Girl was an excursion into the Arab-Israeli conflict and the 1970s-era connection between leftist revolutionary terrorists in Western Europe and their Palestinian counterparts. (Cornwell was strongly inspired by the literary tradition of the pre-Brexit Polish immigrant Joseph Conrad. The Israeli spymaster is named Kurtz, his main operative is Joseph, and the book’s plot is an exploration of the boundaries between civilization and barbarism.) Le Carré returned to Cold War themes with The Russia House’s message that the Russian knight is dying inside his armor, predicting in effect the collapse of the Soviet Union. He then wrapped up the Cold War era with The Secret Pilgrim, a collection of short stories connected by a narrative arc about the retirement of the cast of characters of his Cold War novels and, even more significantly, their morality.

Le Carré’s novels of the 1970s and 1980s are a long contemplation about the nature of betrayal that transcends their historical context. He examines betrayal at multiple levels, from impersonal political treachery, to the deeper level of the betrayal of friends, down to the fundamental betrayal of denying one’s authentic self. Bill Haydon, the mole of Tinker Tailor, betrayed everything, personifying betrayal as a character trait rather than a political act. The message of The Russia House is not just that to be personally loyal we must, sometimes, betray our country—a dominant theme in Verdi operas, for example, where the hero must often choose between amore and patria. Post-ideologically, the novel shows that being loyal to real people justifies betraying unreal ideals. The plot starts with a Russian scientist in the military-industrial complex betraying his country for peace, and ends symmetrically with a British amateur spy betraying his country to save the lover of that now-dead scientist.

Le Carré’s most significant contribution to literature, A Perfect Spy, focuses most acutely on the betrayal of self and others. The political context is secondary. This semi-autobiographical novel finally allowed le Carré to exorcise the ghost of Ronnie. At the end, Magnus Pym reaches absolute authenticity, and then, like the Werther-esque German romantic-tragic character that he is, he maintains his authenticity against a world that expects him to betray himself and others, and commits suicide.

By now, most of le Carré’s novels have been filmed. The medium is usually inappropriate for conveying the complexity, slow pace, and cerebral nature of le Carré’s plots. None of these films survive the test of verisimilitude (unlike the books), largely because as commercial products they are contorted into truly vapid and silly forms. Television miniseries, however, can maintain the complexity and proceed at a sufficiently slow pace to allow the viewers to think about what they are watching.

The BBC adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and Smiley’s People (1982), with Alec Guinness playing George Smiley, are among the best television dramas ever created. This is not just the result of Guinness’s unsurpassable acting, but of the whole production; Arthur Hopcraft’s script captured the essence of the novels and every little role is played perfectly. The miniseries also benefitted from the pre-Brexit presence of foreign actors, especially from the other side of the Iron Curtain. (While the U.S. film convention is to signal conversation in a foreign language with the use of a slight accent, the British norm is to include a few phrases in the actual foreign tongue, which encourages hiring some native speakers.) 

Main roles, though, are usually played by native English speakers, sometimes to unintended comic effect: In the BBC’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy the British actor Ian Bannen played Jim Prideaux, a Circus (MI6) agent who enters Czechoslovakia pretending to be a Paris-based Czech journalist. On the border he makes a joke with the border guard in Czech, explaining that he is coming back to Czechoslovakia because they do not know how to brew beer in France. Bannen speaks his Czech syl-la-ble by syl-la-ble, which makes that border guard seem incredibly gullible in accepting Prideaux’s cover.

In Smiley’s People the Polish actor Vladek Sheybal plays Otto Leipzig, who despite the name is supposed to be Estonian, while German actor Curd Jürgens played Estonian General Vladimir. All this messy mass of European culture, experiences, and talent generated great authentic European art, unintentional comic screw-ups notwithstanding. 

With the end of the Cold War, le Carré lost more than the geopolitical world he knew well and described with insight and irony. He lost his moral and political GPS. Starting at the end of The Secret Pilgrim and in The Night Manager le Carré describes systemically corrupt political institutions led by elites that privatized the state. It sounds like Putin’s Russia, but le Carré is writing about the United Kingdom and the United States. These novels foreshadow the populist backlash against elites a quarter-century before it became politically apparent. His post-Cold War intelligence services make deals with greedy and unscrupulous drug cartels, weapons dealers, private security companies, and international mining and pharmaceutical corporations. Le Carré resurrected the ghost of Ronnie, this time running corporations and governments. Apart from the tragic heroes, the only decent characters are either naive members of an older generation of retired Cold Warriors or outsiders. 

Le Carré’s novels have been for the past quarter-century mostly romantic tragedies about decent people in a corrupt world that crushes them. They are essentially Rousseau-like, and hence barely tolerable. Interestingly, his 2004 novel Absolute Friends mixes the old and new le Carré. It follows a friendship between a British idealist and a German leftist from the 1960s to the War on Terror. The Cold War part is ironic le Carré at his best, culminating with the defection of the rebellious German leftist to East Germany where he is forced by the Stasi to write a letter of apology to his hated Lutheran pastor father, whom he discovers was an East German spy all along. The contemporary part ends with an American neoconservative/fundamentalist private militia and the CIA framing the British idealist and killing him. 

The American agent-turned-fundamentalist killer frequents the summer opera festival at Glyndebourne outside of London, allowing le Carré to warn the readers not to trust Americans, even if they appear civilized. Le Carré depicts Americans not just as being as corrupt and greedy as Europeans, but additionally as dumb, brutal, and religious. The conspiracies that ensnare the idealistic, tragic heroes involve three classes of people: corrupt British officials; greedy and ruthless international corporations; and greedy, ruthless, and dumb Americans. Le Carré’s later books are not bad just because they are anti-American, but because the Americans they depict are cartoons rather than characters. 

Indeed, le Carré’s moral compass gyrated violently after the Cold War. Most surprising was his sympathy for Muslim Caucasian separatism in Our Game and Most Wanted Man, and with fundamentalist Islam in a public debate with Salman Rushdie in the pages of The Guardian. Le Carré claimed that no law protects insulting “a great religion with impunity” and accused Rushdie of preferring his royalties to the safety of innocents. Rushdie had his own sophisticated reply, characterizing le Carré as “an illiterate pompous ass.” Christopher Hitchens, to pile on another layer of British multilingual sophistication, compared le Carré to a man who, “having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head.” 

Le Carré has not always extended his sensitivity to religion to the other Abrahamic faiths. I would, however, absolve le Carré’s Tailor of Panama of anti-Semitism, a charge made in the New York Times. A treacherous Jewish character in a le Carré novel does not stand out; most characters in le Carré’s universe betray each other in some fashion. One of the few entirely loyal and trustworthy characters in the le Carré opus is Mendel, a tough half-Jewish, half-Irish policeman on whom both Control and Smiley rely when they can trust no one else. 

The problem with the characters of Harry Pendel, the Jewish tailor of Panama, and the Mendel character is that they are archaic, but not anti-Semitic, stereotypes: Most Jews involved in the mass emigration out of the pre-modern Czarist Empire after the pogroms of 1881–84 had few “transferable skills” aside from tailoring and physical strength. Mendel and Pendel belong to that era. By the second half of the 20^th century, however, most British Jews, like their American cousins, were gentrified. They had moved from London’s East End to suburbs in the north of the city like Golders Green and Finchley. By the time le Carré developed the characters of Mendel and Pendel, they were as archaic as the ghosts in Chagall’s paintings. Le Carré might as well have added to Pendel’s tailor shop in Panama a backyard with a few goats and Tevye the milkman to tend them.

In his Guardian review of the Sisman biography, Robert McCrum described it as a “preemptive strike against posterity, [in which] pride has finally trumped mystification.” The only possible target of this preemptive strike is Ronnie and the narratives of guilt he spawned to embarrass and emotionally blackmail his son. Aside from a few literary tiffs, David Cornwell has made no enemies, not even in the security services he has been ridiculing for a half-century. MI5 invited him recently to address it, about which he remarked ironically, “If I’d known as much about myself then as I know now, I wouldn’t have cleared myself for secret work.” Ronnie was a fountainhead of le Carré’s creativity. The scars that a psychopathic, manipulative con-artist inflicted on those who followed or were affected by him have not been healed now for almost a century. It is not a unique event. As Kafka wrote to his father in a letter he never sent, all his writings were about him. Geopolitics starts in the bedlam of the nursery, and in some cases never outgrows it. Still, it is nice to be fancied.