John le Carré was a defining writer of his time. This enthralling collection of letters – written to readers, publishers, film-makers and actors, politicians and public figures – reveals the playfully intelligent and unfailingly eloquent man behind the penname. A Private Spy spans seven decades and chronicles not only le Carré’s own life but the turbulent times to which he was witness. Beginning with his 1940s childhood, it includes accounts of his National Service and his time at Oxford, and his days teaching the ‘chinless, pointy-nosed, gooseberry-eyed British lords’ at Eton. It describes his entry into MI5 and the rise of the Iron Curtain, and the flowering of his career as a novelist in reaction to the building of the Berlin Wall. Through his letters we travel with him from the Second World War period to the immediate moment in which we live. We find le Carré writing to Sir Alec Guinness to persuade him to take on the role of George Smiley, and later arguing the immorality of the War on Terror with the chief of the German internal security service. What emerges is a portrait not only of the writer, or of the global intellectual, but, in his own words, of the very private, very passionate and very real man behind the name. Includes letters to:
John Banville, William Burroughs, John Cheever, Stephen Fry, Graham Greene, Sir Alec Guinness, Hugh Laurie,
Ben Macintyre, Ian McEwan, Gary Oldman, Philip Roth, Philippe Sands, Sir Tom Stoppard, Margaret Thatcher, and more …