My dad John le Carré created George Smiley – this was his favourite James Bond

Detailed summary

Talking of authority, Le Carré’s own father, Ronnie, was a conman and a fantasist who starved his son of affection and beat his mother, Olive, forcing her to flee the marriage and…

Nick Harkaway can barely recall a time when George Smiley wasn’t part of his life. Growing up in the seventies, if his parents weren’t reading his father’s latest work in progress across the breakfast table, Alec Guinness, who starred as the lugubrious spymaster in two iconic BBC adaptations, would be on the telephone. “I can still hear him, ‘I wonder if I might speak to Mr David Cornwell?’” recalls Nick today.

His father was, of course, best known as John le Carré, creator of The Circus and its short, bespectacled and perpetually disillusioned (yet utterly relentless) agent George Smiley – the antithesis of Ian Fleming’s superspy James Bond.

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