Birthday quote 19th Oct

David John Moore Cornwell (born 19th October 1931) is best known by the pen name John le Carré. He is a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and '60s, he worked for both the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service.

Le Carré graduated fromOxford in 1956 with a First Class Honours Bachelor of Arts degree. He then taught French and German at Eton College for two years, before becoming an MI5 officer in 1958. He ran agents, conducted interrogations, tapped telephone lines and effected break-ins. Encouraged by Lord Clanmorris (who wrote crime novels as "John Bingham"), and whilst being an active MI5 officer, Le Carré began writing his first novel, Call for the Dead (1961). Cornwell has identified Lord Clanmorris as one of two models for George Smiley, the spymaster of the Circus, the other being Vivian H. H. Green.

In 1960, he transferred to MI6, the foreign-intelligence service, and worked under the cover of Second Secretary at the British Embassy at Bonn; he later was transferred to Hamburg as a political consul. There, he wrote the detective story A Murder of Quality (1962) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), first using his pen-ma,e "John le Carré" (le Carré is French for "the square") – a pseudonym which was required because Foreign Office officers were forbidden to publish in their own names.

His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works.

In 1964 le Carré left the service to work full-time as a novelist, his intelligence-officer career at an end as the result of the betrayal of British agents' covers to the KGB by Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent (one of the Cambridge Five). Le Carré depicts and analyses Philby as the upper-class traitor, code-named "Gerald" by the KGB, the mole George Smiley hunts in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).

"The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal."

John le Carré (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy)

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