"In the making of character, I feel completely happy. [...] I get two innocent people into a Hitchcockian muddle and make them fight their way out. But from scene to scene, they have to lead me. [...] To me, that is the whole of life. I can’t put it differently." Today's Democracy Now! features an extended interview with John le Carré on topics from Tony Blair, geopolitics, and money laundering to the novelist's life and work.
posted by RogerB on Oct 11, 2010 - 10 comments

Ex MI5 / MI6 man John Le Carre talks to Radio4's Today program about his new book. He then goes on to talk about how the Muslim boogeyman is being used to erode democracy much more than the IRA ever was. [more inside]
posted by sodium lights the horizon on Sep 8, 2010 - 44 comments

For Graham Greene he was "unquestionably our best thriller writer". John le Carré once called him "the source on which we all draw". With the six novels he wrote in the years leading up to the second world war - five of which have just been reissued by Penguin Modern Classics - Eric Ambler revitalised the British thriller, rescuing the genre from the jingoistic clutches of third-rate imitators of John Buchan, and recasting it in a more realist, nuanced and leftishly intelligent - not to mention exciting - mould. - The writing of Eric Ambler
posted by Artw on Jun 6, 2009 - 14 comments

- "But will people be killed, Daddy?"
- "Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people."
This hypothetical dialogue created by british writer John Le Carré in an article for the Times Online makes me wonder if there are people who really think of this world with that distance of the reality. By the way, the whole Carré's article has interesting insights about the ongoing war (although it was written two months before its beginning).
posted by nandop on Mar 20, 2003 - 19 comments