Was he John or was he David? That’s the trouble with being a literary double agent: there’s always the significant other to consider. David Cornwell, alias John le Carré, devised his pseudonym in 1958, on the same day he also created his most famous character, George Smiley, on the opening page of his first novel, Call for the Dead. This was when le Carré – a fresh recruit to MI5 and on his daily two-hour train commute into central London – ‘just began writing in a little notebook’.

The bounty contained within this and succeeding notebooks has resounded with far greater global impact than le Carré’s all-too-brief career as a professional spy. While MI5 and then MI6 both lost a diligent and dutiful servant, English fiction gained a master chronicler whose work spanned the building and knocking-down of the Berlin Wall and beyond, up to the age of Tony Blair and Brexit – both anathema to le Carré. Along the way, le Carré’s prodigious quest for knowledge and his innate creative ingenuity transformed the spy novel into great literature. He also provided the English language with a host of new meanings for such familiar words as ‘circus’, ‘mole’, ‘babysitter’, ‘lamplighter’, ‘pavement artists’, et al.

By the time he died in December 2020 at the age of eighty-nine, le Carré had bequeathed the world twenty-five novels (an additional one, Silverview, was published posthumously), plus a book of memoirs, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from a life (2016). Intriguingly, the latter was published just a year after the excellent biography of le Carré by Adam Sisman, which le Carré at first supported, then resisted. As Sisman wrote archly later: ‘Memoir is what you can remember: biography aspires to objective truth.’ (Bearing this in mind, I recommend, when reading le Carré’s letters, to keep Sisman near to hand.)