Vladimir Putin’s Russia has sought to influence elections across the globe. Photo: Reuters
John le Carré spent six years being a spy and more than 60 years writing, often hauntingly, about the murky world of espionage. The writer – who died in 2020 as an Irish citizen in protest against Brexit – began with Britain’s internal secret police, MI5, in 1958 and later moved to the overseas spy services, MI6.
He worked mainly in Germany under diplomatic cover before the success of his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, allowed him take to full-time writing.
