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Good old writers
Who says old geezers can’t write? Some of them die with the sharpest minds. That’s certainly true of the literary critic Frank Kermode, who has just died at the age of 90. Reading about his death yesterday, I turned to his essays published in the London Review of Books. You can’t tell his age from…
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Le Carre’s Most Wanted Man
A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carre John Le Carre hates the “war on terror” and sympathizes with its victims. But he has let his feelings get the better of his art in A Most Wanted Man, for sympathy alone cannot animate the title character. Issa Karpov doesn’t come to life like George Smiley.…
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Len Deighton and John Le Carre
Len Deighton turned 80 last week, I just discovered from the Guardian. He was born on February 18, 1929, according to Wikipedia.(Telegraph photo.) Honestly I didn’t even know he was still around, for I haven’t seen any new book by him for a long time. His last thriller was Charity, published in 1996. That’s sad…
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Le Carre: The spy who almost went out into the cold
John Le Carre was tempted to defect to the Soviet Union when he worked for MI6 during the Cold War in the early Sixties. “I wasn’t tempted ideologically, but when you spy intensively and you get closer and closer to the border . . . it seems such a small step to jump . .…
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