The Right Coast

February 02, 2005
 
Spy fiction
By Tom Smith

Good and good for you. John Le Carre is an old boy of my college at Oxford, though that is not his real name. He endowed a room there above the JCR. He is a fine novelist, although a dyed-in-the-wool anti-American, as many in the British intel community are, for reasons I don't really understand. Maybe the CIA gives them a rather bad impression of Yanks, or maybe they just don't like not having the empire any more. Anyway, the list is as reliable as anything in the wilderness of mirrors can be.