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“... and Lawrence Urdang move from one dictionary house to another. Oxford (with R.W. Burchfield and John Sykes) is comparatively stable. When work began on the new Collins, Paul Procter and Della Summers were young conductors under impresario Urdang, and they later moved on to make dictionaries for Longman. Patrick Hanks was recruited to complete the Collins ...”

“... to promise a high-class thriller, though the 1970s setting suggests murky dealings – with John le Carré being thanked, under the non-pen name of David Cornwell, for ‘irresistible reminiscences’ – rather than any particular glamour. Serena Frome (the pronunciation of her name, Froom, poshly at odds with its ...”

“... how otherwise do we explain the testimony of such a reliable figure as the military historian, John Keegan, who says that he heard King tell a group at Sandhurst in 1975 about the need for the Armed Forces to act to save the country. Keegan says: ‘I had no doubt I was listening to a treasonable attempt to suborn the loyalty of the Queen’s ...”

“... whole event in some sane perspective? They cannot retreat into a grand carelessness until they are John le Carré or John Fowles. They might begin, however, by running through the list of previous winners and working out how many of the last 19 would feature in any ‘true’ list of Top ...”

“... plots, Lone Ranger clichés and gushing emotions to psychological acuity of the kind you find in John le Carré, whom he’s unlikely to have read. Mai Jia has no interest in the tradition of espionage literature (in a promotional video for Penguin he mentioned only James Bond and Mission Impossible). ‘I read very ...”

“... specific, criticising Malcolm Bradbury and Christopher Bigsby for presenting Margaret Drabble and John Le Carré as ‘most important writers’. He goes on to reproach the same critics for appealing to a ‘supposed consensus’ and for the use of the phrase ‘our time’, which Hill glosses as ‘your time made placable ...”

“... need to read WikiLeaks’s unexpurgated accounts of skulduggery or even the scrupulous novels of John le Carré: to see what a mission really looks like one only has to watch the Al-Bustan Rotana’s CCTV footage, released on the internet by the Dubai Government Media Office last spring. This half-hour of footage is a gift ...”

“... 20 May, is the date of Kent’s arrest. Where else does he slip up? He mentions that Knight and John le Carré knew one another, but doesn’t see fit to add that le Carré – under his real name, David Cornwell – illustrated one or two of Knight’s post-war publications ...”

“... like Kenyatta; he preached national unity (as they all did). One who hoped much from him was John Githongo, the hero of Wrong’s fascinating, richly researched and important new book, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower. Githongo believed Kibaki when he proclaimed an end to corruption, and became his right-hand man in the task of ...”

“... and satisfies a popular audience on two fronts. The point becomes clear in the novels of Le Carré, Greene’s most intelligent and most faithful disciple. (Perhaps the admiration became mutual: Greene’s late thriller, The Human Factor, could almost have been written by Le Carré.) Le ...”

“... the handsome bribes he is paying. It’s true that all this seems closer to the fiction of John le Carré than to the theory of relativity, but a set of novels is surely none the worse for that. Durrell’s second wife, Eve Cohen, the model for Justine, at the Scottish School for Girls. From ‘Vintage ...”

“... was a bit (or more than a bit) of a rogue, as, variously, Greer, Ackerley, David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many ...”

“... engineers – under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances are compelled to act like heroes. John le Carré once called him ‘the source on which we all draw’. Alan Furst has been drawing on him for nearly twenty years: ‘The first paragraph of Kingdom of Shadows is a direct citation of Eric Ambler,’ he told an ...”

“... to creature comforts. I wondered, for instance, if the Russians had got round to mineral water. John Sturrock reassured me. ‘Haven’t you heard of Perrierstroika?’ The Writers’ Union is a pleasant one-storeyed 19th-century building set round a leafy courtyard and currently being refurbished against Mr Reagan’s visit. He is to have lunch here. We ...”

“... bipolar Kulturkampf, it did leak out to a wide public through the fictions of Len Deighton and John Le Carré. Watching the shadow-play on the walls of the Cold War cave, and seeing the literal interpenetration of opposites as Karla penetrated ‘us’, and ‘we’ reciprocated, one could make the induction that the spy ...”