by Adam Sisman
32 ‘In Ronnie’s Court’, pp. 134–5.
33 DC to Ann Sharp, 24 March 1952.
34 R. S. Thompson to Keith Murray, 2 May 1952, Lincoln College Archive.
35 DC to Ann Sharp, 26 May 1952.
36 DC to Ann Sharp, 6 May and 25 June 1952.
37 DC to Ann Sharp, 20 August 1952.
38 DC to Ann Sharp, 8 September 1952.
39 DC to Ann Sharp, 15, 18 and 29 September 1952.
40 DC to Ann Sharp, 25 September 1952.
41 ‘In Ronnie’s Court’, p. 144.
42 DC to Ann Sharp, 6, 7 and 8 October 1952.
6: ‘That little college in Turl’
1 Vivian H. H. Green, The Commonwealth of Lincoln College 1427–1977 (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 586.
2 DC to Ann Sharp, 7 and 8 October 1952.
3 Ann Sharp’s diary, 28 August 1952; Tim Cornwell private archive.
4 ‘Behind an Iron Curtain’ (interview with Zoë Heller), Independent on Sunday, 1 August 1993.
5 DC to Ann Sharp, 15 February 1953.
6 DC to Ann Sharp, 8 September 1952.
7 DC to Ann Sharp, 24 October 1952.
8 DC to Ann Sharp, 22 July 1953.
9 DC to Ann Sharp, 24 November and 4 December 1952.
10 DC to Ann Sharp, 27 April 1953.
11 DC to Ann Sharp, 4 February 1953.
12 DC to Ann Sharp, 22 July 1953.
13 DC to Ann Sharp, 13 April 1953.
14 ‘At the Edge of the Real World’.
15 DC to Ann Sharp, 18 May 1953 [mistakenly dated 1955].
16 Richie Benaud, Anything But: An Autobiography (Hodder & Stoughton, 1998), p. 79.
17 Ibid.
18 DC to Ann Sharp, 6 June 1953.
19 DC to Ann Sharp, 8 June 1953.
20 DC to Ann Sharp, 8 and 14 June 1953.
21 DC to Ann Sharp, 13 and 22 July, 11 August 1953.
22 DC to Ann Sharp, 16 and 11 May 1953. As with the letter of 18 May cited above, the second of these two letters is dated 1955, but it seems clear from the context that this must date from two years before.
23 ‘Le Carré draws a veil over a lost chapter’, ‘New Grub Street’, Sunday Times, 5 January 1992.
24 Eric Homberger, ‘Knight, (Charles Henry) Maxwell (1900–1968), intelligence officer and naturalist’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
25 DC to Newton Garver, 1 April 1999.
26 DC to Newton Garver, 29 October 2007.
27 Martin Kettle, ‘What MI5’s records on my father tell us about the uses of surveillance’, Guardian, 28 July 2011.
28 Lincoln Imp, Michaelmas Term 1953 (no. 6).
29 DC to Ann Sharp, 26 May 1954.
30 DC to Ann Sharp, 1 and 26 May 1954.
31 DC to Ann Sharp, 27 April 1954.
32 ‘Secrets and Lies’ (interview with Alan Franks), The Times, 13 February 1999.
33 ‘New Grub Street’, Sunday Times, 12 January 1992.
34 DC to Barbara, Carla and Dan (Mitchell’s family), 25 October 2011.
7: ‘This really is the end’
1 DC to Ann Sharp, 8 June 1953.
2 Unheaded document marked ‘confidential’, 14 November 1953.
3 DC to Ann Sharp, 5 May 1954.
4 DC to Ann Sharp, 9 October 1953.
5 DC to Ann Sharp, 24 November 1953.
6 DC to Ann Sharp, 18 January, 1 and 3 February, 5 April and 9 March 1954.
7 DC to the Bursar, Lincoln College, 11 February 1954, Lincoln College Archive.
8 National Archives, Kew, BT 22 15692.
9 ‘A Good Deed in a Naughty World’ (Victim Support, 2000).
10 DC to Vivian Green, 7 April 1954.
11 DC to Ann Sharp, 5 and 10 April 1954.
12 ‘At the Edge of the Real World’.
13 ‘Sarratt and the Draper of Watford’, in Sarratt and the Draper of Watford, and other unlikely stories about Sarratt (privately published, 1999), pp. 18–19.
14 DC to Ann Sharp, 6 and 16 May 1954.
15 Walter Oakeshott to D. E. Cooke, 11 and 12 June 1954.
16 DC to Ann Sharp, 26 June 1954.
17 ‘A guide through the complexities of my plots’, Guardian, 5 March 2005, originally, “Vivian H. H. Green’, a eulogy given at his memorial service in Oxford in 2005.
18 See, for example, the eulogies by Susan Brigden and Paul Langford, published in the Lincoln College Record 2004–2005.
19 ‘John le Carré: The Secret Centre’ (interview with Nigel Williams), BBC 2, 2000.
20 ‘A guide through the complexities of my plots’.
21 DC to Ann Sharp, 28 June 1954.
22 Daily Express, 1 July 1954.
23 ‘In Ronnie’s Court’, p. 150.
24 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of Single & Single (2001).
25 ‘At the Edge of the Real World’.
26 DC to Ann Sharp, 29 September and undated [October?] 1954.
27 DC to Vivian Green, undated [September 1954].
28 DC to Kaspar von Almen, 3 October 1954.
29 DC to Kaspar von Almen, 13 October 1954.
30 DC to Vivian Green, 29 October 1954.
31 DC to Ann Sharp, 17 November 1954.
32 DC to Vivian Green, 13 December 1954.
33 Ibid.
8: Poor but happy
1 Christopher Martin (ed.), Millfield: A School for All Seasons (privately published, 2007).
2 DC to Vivian Green, undated (late 1954/early 1955).
3 ‘Violent Image’ (interview with Alan Watson), Sunday Times, 30 March 1969; Michael Dean, ‘John le Carré: The Writer who Came in from the Cold’, broadcast on BBC 2, published in the Listener, 92 (5 September 1974); ‘John le Carré: The Art of Fiction No. 149’ (interview with George Plimpton), Paris Review, 143 (Summer 1997).
4 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1991).
5 ‘Mum’s boy – man with a mission’, article in Daily Echo (Bournemouth)(date not found).
6 DC to Robin Cooke, undated (late 1954/early 1955).
7 DC to Walter Oakeshott, 2 May 1955, Lincoln College Archive.
8 DC to Vivian Green, 14 June 1955, ibid.
9 Walter Oakeshott to D. E. Cooke, 14 May 1955, ibid.
10 DC to Vivian Green, 29 April 1955.
11 ‘A guide through the complexities of my plots’.
12 J. R. Thring to Walter Oakeshott, 25 October 1955; Oakeshott to Thring, 26 October 1955, Lincoln College Archive.
13 DC to Vivian Green, 9 September 1955, ibid.
14 Vivian Green, ‘A Perfect Spy: A Personal Reminiscence’ (unpublished paper), pp. 12–13.
15 DC to Robin Cooke, undated (late 1955/early 1956).
16 DC to Robin Cooke, 7 October 1955.
17 DC to Vivian Green, undated (early 1955), Lincoln College Archive.
18 DC to Vivian Green, 31 December 1955.
19 Jean Cornwell to Vivian Green, 8 February and 15 March 1956.
20 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 331.
21 Walter Oakeshott to the Warden, St Edward’s School, 1 February 1956, Lincoln College Archive.
22 R. S. Thompson to the Warden, St Edward’s School, 9 February 1956, ibid.
23 Robert Birley to Walter Oakeshott, 1 and 6 March 1956; Oakeshott to Birley, 5 March 1956, ibid.
24 ‘Making ends meet on £70 a week’, Poole and East Dorset Herald, 20 July 1955.
25 AC to Lynn Sharp, 2 May 1956.
26 ‘Secrets and Lies’ (interview with Alan Franks), The Times, 13 February 1999.
27 DC to Alison Shacklock, 26 June 1956.
28 Ibid.
29 DC to Vivian Green, 26 June 1956, Lincoln College Archive.
9: ‘Milk in first and then Indian’
1 ‘For the Record’ (interview with Alan Watson), London Weekend Television, 1968.
2 DC to Vivian Green, 24 October 1956, Lincoln College Archive.
3 Tim Card, Eton Renewed: A History from 1860 to the Present Day (John Mu
rray, 1994), p. 242.
4 ‘For the Record’ (interview with Alan Watson).
5 DC to Vivian Green, undated [probably February 1957], Lincoln College Archive.
6 P. S. H. Lawrence (ed.), Grizel: Grizel Hartley Remembered (Michael Russell Publishing, Wilton, 1991), pp. 167 and 198.
7 DC to Vivian Green, 24 October 1956, Lincoln College Archive.
8 Ferdinand Mount, Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes (Bloomsbury, 2008), p. 88.
9 DC to Vivian Green, 24 October 1956, Lincoln College Archive.
10 DC to Vivian Green, undated (March 1956), Lincoln College Archive.
11 Mount, Cold Cream, pp. 57–8.
12 DC to Vivian Green, 24 October 1956.
13 ‘For the Record’ (interview with Alan Watson).
14 DC to Vivian Green, undated [probably February 1957].
15 Boyle papers, MS 660, correspondence on Suez, 3499–948, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.
16 ‘The betrayal of Smiley’s people’ (interview with James Naughtie), The Times, 29 November 2003.
17 Mount, Cold Cream, p. 80.
18 DC to Hugh Cecil, 12 March 2009.
19 Mount, Cold Cream, p. 58.
20 DC to Vivian Green, undated [probably February 1957].
21 AC to Vivian Green, undated [August 1957].
22 DC to AC, dated Monday, Monday night, Wednesday and Thursday [probably August 1957].
23 DC to AC, undated [August 1957].
24 Colin Clark, Younger Brother, Younger Son: A Memoir (HarperCollins, 1997).
25 DC to Vivian Green, 29 November 1957.
26 ‘The Secret Life of John le Carré’ (interview with Stephen Schiff), Vanity Fair, 52 (June 1989).
27 ‘Obituary: John Wells’, Independent, 12 January 1998.
28 DC to Vivian Green, 29 November 1957.
29 D. R. Thorpe, Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan (Chatto & Windus, 2010), p. 660, n. 40.
30 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of A Murder of Quality (1990).
31 A Murder of Quality (Lamplighter edition), pp. 48 and 51.
32 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of Call for the Dead (1992).
33 ‘John le Carré: The Secret Centre’ (interview with Nigel Williams), BBC 2, 2000.
34 Speech in the Sheldonian Theatre to the Oxford Literary Festival, 24 March 2010.
35 ‘Don’t be Beastly to your Secret Service’, Sunday Times Review, 23 March 1986.
36 DC to AC, undated.
37 DC to AC, 16 March 1958 and undated [spring 1958].
10: ‘A dead-end sort of place’
1 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 327.
2 Peter Wright, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (Viking Penguin, 1987), p. 35.
3 Ibid., pp. 37 and 39.
4 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 338.
5 ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’, The Times Magazine, 7 August 1993.
6 Wright, Spycatcher, p. 39.
7 DC to AC, undated.
8 ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’.
9 Wright, Spycatcher, p. 54.
10 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of Call for the Dead (1992).
11 ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’.
12 Stella Rimington, Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5 (Hutchinson, 2001), p. 101.
13 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 332.
14 Ibid., pp. 332 and 333.
15 Rimington, Open Secret, p. 102.
16 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 331.
17 Rimington, Open Secret, pp. 90, 98 and 101–2.
18 Ibid., p. 100.
19 ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’.
20 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of Call for the Dead (1992).
21 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 325.
22 Ben Macintyre, A Spy among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 159.
23 ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’.
24 ‘In my day, MI6 – which I called the Circus in the books – stank of wartime nostalgia’ (interview with Pip Ayers), Daily Mail, 15 July 2011.
25 Wright, Spycatcher, pp. 71ff.
26 Rimington, Open Secret, p. 94.
27 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 393.
28 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of Call for the Dead (1992).
29 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 395.
30 DC to AC, 20 July 1959.
31 From Madeleine Bingham’s unpublished autobiography ‘Smiley’s Wife’. I am indebted to Michael Jago for sending me copies of the relevant passages from the typescript.
32 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of Call for the Dead (1992).
33 Call for the Dead, p. 46. The Oxford English Dictionary entry for ‘tradecraft’ is muddled, citing the passage in Call for the Dead to illustrate an alternative meaning of the term: ‘the craft or art of trading or dealing’.
34 ‘Don’t be Beastly to your Secret Service’.
35 Introduction to the paperback reissue of John Bingham’s My Name is Michael Sibley (Simon & Schuster, 2000).
36 DC to Lord Clanmorris, 10 August 2010.
37 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, pp. 410 and 406.
38 ‘Julia Pirie: MI5 agent who for two decades worked at the heart of the British Communist Party’, Daily Telegraph obituary, 28 October 2008.
39 DC to Lord Clanmorris, 10 August 2010.
40 ‘The Spy who Stayed out in the Cold’, Guardian, 27 November 1999.
41 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, pp. 431–2.
42 DC to AC, both undated [early 1959?].
43 DC to AC, undated [1959?].
44 DC to Kaspar von Almen, 29 May 1960.
45 Michael Jago, The Man Who Was George Smiley: The Life of John Bingham (Biteback, 2013), pp. 251–2.
46 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of Call for the Dead (1992).
47 DC to Horace Hale Crosse, 7 August 1963.
11: A small town in Germany
1 Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949 (Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 225.
2 ‘In my day, MI6 – which I called the Circus in the books – stank of wartime nostalgia’ (interview with Pip Ayers), Daily Mail, 15 July 2011.
3 Wright, Spycatcher, pp. 28–9.
4 ‘White, Sir Dick Goldsmith (1906–1993), intelligence officer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004.
5 For the account that follows of the new entrants’ training course I gratefully acknowledge as a principal source the unpublished memoir by Sir John Margetson.
6 Peter Watt to Hilary Rubinstein, 20 October 1960, Gollancz Archive.
7 Leonard Downie Jr, ‘Le Carré: Author Cloaked in Mystery’, Washington Post, 29 September 1980.
8 Gollancz Archive.
9 John Bingham to Hilary Rubinstein, 22 November 1960, Gollancz Archive.
10 ‘Fifty Years Later’, the afterword to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of The Spy who Came in from the Cold (Viking Penguin, 2013).
11 DC to Roger Hermiston, 12 April 2012, Gollancz Archive.
12 DC to Hilary Rubinstein, 21 January 1961, Gollancz Archive.
13 DC to John Margetson, 5 July 1961.
14 DC to AC, 6 June 1961.
15 A Small Town in Germany (Pan edition, 1969), pp. 18–19.
16 Ibid., p. 106.
17 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of A Small Town in Germany (1991).
18 ‘John le Carré in Conversation’ (interview with Anne McElvoy), broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 29 July 2013.
19 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of A Small Town in Germany (1991).
20 Michael Marten (ed.), Tim Marten: Memories (privately published, 2009).
21 DC to AC, undated [June 1961].
22 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of A Small Town in Germany (1991).
23 A Small Town in Germany (Pan edition, 1969), p. 142.
24 AC t
o John Margetson, 2 August 1961.
25 A Small Town in Germany (Pan edition, 1969), pp. 36–7.
26 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1990).
27 DC to Miranda Coldstream, undated [June 1961].
28 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of A Murder of Quality (1990).
29 Sheila Hodges to Victor Gollancz, 1 February 1962, Gollancz Archive.
30 DC to AC, undated [March 1962?].
31 Godfrey Smith, introduction to the reissued edition of James Kennaway’s Tunes of Glory (Mainstream, 1980).
32 DC to AC, 11 March 1962.
33 The Spy who Came in from the Cold (Gollancz, 1963), p. 20.
34 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1990).
35 DC to AC, 30 June 1962.
36 Foreword to the Lamplighter edition of The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1990).
37 Dan Neil, ‘The 50 Worst Cars of All Time’, Time, 4 September 2007.
38 The Lively Arts, BBC TV interview, transmitted 25 September 1977.
39 DC to AC, 30 June 1962.
40 DC to Horace Hale Crosse, 7 August 1963. In this letter David says that he ‘decided to begin the task of giving final shape’ to The Spy who Came in from the Cold in August 1961, while he was still engaged on A Murder of Quality, but I have assumed that this is an exaggeration.
41 ‘John le Carré: The Secret Centre’ (interview with Nigel Williams), BBC 2, 2000.
12: Becoming John le Carré
1 Peter Watt to Victor Gollancz, 26 November 1962, Gollancz Archive.
2 The Spy who Came in from the Cold, p. 20; William Boyd, ‘Rereading: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré’, Guardian, 24 July 2010.
3 Victor Gollancz to Peter Watt, 8 February 1963; Watt to Gollancz, 27 February 1963, Gollancz Archive.
4 DC to AC, 30 January 1963.
5 DC to Vivian Green, 6 February 1963.
6 Richard Davenport-Hines, An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (HarperCollins, 2013), p. 262.
7 Jack Geoghegan, ‘Discovering “The Spy” – 25 years later’, a new introduction to The Spy who Came in from the Cold (Book of the Month Club, 1988).
8 Eleanor Doemstag, ‘Behind the Lines: A Literary Casebook: How the home office got The Spy home’, Book Week, 27 May 1964.
9 DC to Vivian Green, 7 July 1963.
