In a review of James Fennimore Cooper's The Spy (1823), the critic wrote: "No sympathy can be excited with meanness, and there must be a degree of meanness ever associated with the idea of Spy." Eighty years later the Morning Post entitled its review of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent "The Real Anarchist" and claimed that "it is a study of real value for the student of contemporary politics." This tells us something about the evolving conception of the spy in society, and the novels of John le Carré further explore and develop this image.

John le Carré was born David John Moore Cornwell, in Poole, Dorset, October 19, 1931. His mother abandoned the family when he was six, and le Carré later learned that his father, Ronnie Cornwell, was a crafty con man who had served a prison term. Betrayal and deception...