John le Carré at the premiere of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in 2011
Credit: Sang Tan/AP
One of John le Carré’s final public appearances came on his 88th birthday – October 19 2019 – when he was one of the hundreds of thousands of people taking part in the “Together for the Final Say” march calling for a second Brexit referendum.
There’s a fine photograph of him on that day, with his walking stick and “Bollocks to Brexit” sticker, eyes stern under beetling brows worthy of Methuselah. This is not just the look of a man annoyed that he’s having to miss out on a birthday tea at Claridge’s: this is somebody full of righteous fury about the seemingly never-ending stupidity of those who have run the world over the nine decades of his existence.
Craig Sisterson pays tribute to a legend.
On December 12, one of the world’s greatest spy masters slipped from this world. Not from an assassin’s bullet in a darkened alley, poisoning from a nerve agent, or a wretched betrayal by someone wrongly trusted; but pneumonia. After a lifetime entwined with spycraft, David John Moore Cornwell, formerly of MI5 and MI6, passed away in his hospital bed, aged 89.
As the news broke the following day, the cover name Cornwell had created 60 years ago – not for a secret assignment, but for an espionage novel he was writing while still working for the British intelligence services during the Cold War – began trending worldwide.
Half-angels fighting half-devils: the secret world of Le Canberra
Opinion
Tony WrightAssociate editor and special writer
December 18, 2020 â 10.50pm
December 18, 2020 â 10.50pm
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Fearing the forces of national security and the law - or at least a process server bearing a court order - we had locked ourselves in an obscure room within the vast Parliament House.
It was a darkroom used by news photographers, filled with the fumes of chemicals used to develop pictures in a time before digital cameras.
The headquarters of ASIO (right) near Parliament House in Canberra.
Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
Here was the unromantic side of the cloak-and-dagger business.
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After the death of John le Carré was announced a few days ago, a friend asked me where I thought the creator of George Smiley and the Circus would rank in a generation. I told him I didn’t have the faintest idea. Where does he “rank” now? Most of the younger people I know (“younger” meaning under forty) have never read le Carré; if they know his work at all, it’s via adaptations for TV and movies. As for the critics, they’ve preferred to slot him as a chronicler of “the Cold War,” a term that is at once indispensable and nearly meaningless, so profligate is its misuse. Never mind that many of his books take us well past that era.
David Cornwell, aka John Le Carré, the master of the spy novel, died this week. There are a thousand obituaries of Le Carré online, but perhaps it is worth the
Mekong Review remembering the author’s writing on Asia. For those obsessed with South East Asia Le Carré’s
The Honourable Schoolboy, published in 1977, is without doubt the most engrossing espionage novel of the region. For Le Carré fans it is the novel in which his greatest character George Smiley begins to rebuild an effective British intelligence service in the wake of the unravelling of “the Service” following the revelation of a senior Soviet mole in