For a hundred years, for better or worse, no institution has played a larger role in American culture and politics. And no corporation with comparable clout has been continuously controlled by a single family since 1896.
This month, at 69, Arthur Sulzberger Jr will retire as company chairman, after decades of speculation that he would be the last Sulzberger to run the business.
In 2005, a vicious profile in the New Yorker asked: “Can Arthur Sulzberger Jr save the Times – and himself?” A couple of years later, Vanity Fair declared that he had “steered his inheritance into a ditch”.
As the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, put it to the Guardian this week: “As recently as five years ago, the biggest question was: “Is [Mike] Bloomberg going to own the Times or [Mexican billionaire] Carlos Slim?”
In his books, le Carré quietly went for the heart
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The wrong side won: Remembering John le Carré
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This ambiguous conclusion is attributed to le Carré’s favourite character, George Smiley, in his novel
The Secret Pilgrim, but it is an unmistakable theme of most of le Carré’s post-Cold War novels. Le Carré’s death this week came after decades of disillusionment with the new world order and his increasing disenchantment with the behaviour of the Cold War’s victors.
Not that le Carré was rooting for the Soviet bloc – “the right side lost”, after all – but he became convinced that the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the associated demise of anti-communism, left the West without a coherent ideology.
John le Carré
The former intelligence agent is known for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and The Russia House.
John le Carré, the British intelligence agent turned enigmatic author of such iconic espionage novels as
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, has died. He was 89.
Le Carré died Saturday evening in Cornwall, England, after a short illness that was not COVID-19 related, his literary agent, Jonny Geller of The Curtis Brown Group, reported. I represented [le Carré] for almost 15 years, Geller said. I have lost a mentor, an inspiration and most importantly, a friend. We will not see his like again.
FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA
British author John le Carre (David John Moore Cornwell) speaks at the ceremony where he is awarded the Olof Palme Award 2019 for his engaging and humanistic opinion making in literary form regarding the freedom of the individual and the fundamental issues of mankind in the Concert Hall Grunewaldsalen, on Jan. 30, 2020 in Stockholm, Sweden. Le Carre died Saturday Dec. 12, 2020. He was 89. (Claudio Bresciani/TT News Agency/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)
John le Carré, spy novelist who transcended genre to literary art, dies at 89
Kim Philby, the notorious Soviet mole who burrowed into the upper echelons of Britain’s Cold War-era intelligence services, was a subject of fear-driven fascination for novelist John le Carré. The two men, Le Carré felt, had far too much in common as upper-class-hating sons of dissolute fathers “so oversized that your only resort as a child was to subterfuge and deceit.”
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