JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

As his new book, A Delicate Truth, heads for bookstores, John le Carré reminds readers and critics that his novels are not authentic accounts of the espionage business but works of fiction.

But I was never a mastermind, or a mini-mind, and long before I even entered the secret world, I had an instinct towards fiction that made me a dubious fact-gatherer. I was never at personal risk in my secret work; I was frequently bored stiff by it. Had things been otherwise, my employers would not have allowed me to publish my novel, even if later they kicked themselves for doing so: but that was because they decided it was being taken too seriously by too many people; and because any suggestion that the British Secret Service would betray its own was deemed derogatory to its ethical principles, bad for recruitment, and accordingly Bad for Britain, a charge to which there is no effective answer…

Read John le Carré: ‘I was a secret even to myself.’