John Le Carré

John Le Carré is the pen  name of David Cornwell (it means John The Square in French). The rough biographical facts of his life are on his official website:

[He] was born in 1931 in Poole, Dorset, and was educated at Sherborne School, at the University of Berne (where he studied German literature for a year) and at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first-class honours degree in modern languages.

He taught at Eton from 1956 to 1958 and was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, serving first as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn and subsequently as Political Consul in Hamburg. He started writing novels in 1961, and since then has published twenty-one titles.

 Along with some quotes about himself by himself, my favorite being:

A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue. Some of you may wonder why I am reluctant to submit to interviews on television and radio and in the press. The answer is that nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Yet I am treated by the media as though I wrote espionage handbooks.

And to a point I am flattered that my fabulations are taken so seriously. Yet I also despise myself in the fake role of guru, since it bears no relation to who I am or what I do. Artists, in my experience, have very little centre. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

Le Carré had his 22nd novel, published in 2010, Our Kind of Traitor, about the Russian mob in modern day Great Britain. He considers A Perfect Spy (1986) his most autobiographical novel, and in fact, to readers who want to know more about David Cornwell the man, Le Carré refers them to this novel. His most broadly acclaimed novel is his third, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.  This novel was written in 1963 at the height of the "Cold War," at the height of the popularity of the James Bond franchise, and was widely considered to have taken the wind out of the whole James Bond image of foreign espionage. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was also made into a pretty darn movie starting the long-late but often great Richard Burton. In the grand tradition of YouTube, it was chopped up into 12 segments and posted to YouTube, but only segments 3-5 remain (probably due to copyright reasons). Below is segment 4. Enjoy it while you can.