THE NIGHT MANAGER is, hands down, the BEST spy novel I have ever read. If it has not or did not win a Pulitzer, Le Carre was robbed.First of all, let me be clear: I _have_ read the best out there. I don't spend _all_ of my free time with the doings of espiocrats, as LeCarre dubs them, but I was ...
My first Le Carre, so I was expecting to be thrilled, something cat-and-mouse type of story. After all, someone killed Justin Quayle's wife while she's on a perfectly justifiable, if not very dangerous mission. And it was not a quick death like an assassination----she was stripped naked, possibly...
”What would it be like really and absolutely to believe? (...) To know, really and absolutely know, that there's a Divine Being not set in time or space who reads your thoughts better than you ever did, and probably before you even have them? To believe that God sends you to war, God bends the pa...
Τηλεφώνημα για το νεκρόΤο 1984 κυκλοφόρησε από τις εκδόσεις Bell ένας τόμος με τον τίτλο "Ντετέκτιβ Σμάιλυ", που περιέχει τα δυο πρώτα μικρά μυθιστορήματα του Τζον Λε Καρέ, το "Τηλεφώνημα για το νεκρό" και το "Έγκλημα ποιότητας", τα οποία πλέον κυκλοφορούν σε ξεχωριστά βιβλία από τις εκδόσεις Κασ...
Bruno Salvador (aka Salvo) is young man, now living in London, of mixed race, born of a Congolese mom and an Irish Catholic missionary. A natural at languages and a master of many African tongues, Bruno finds work as an interpreter, including work for British Intelligence. It is through his Bri...
For quite some time, this was one of the most amazing successes in the genre of espionage fiction. It reined supreme. The reading public had never seen anything quite like it. Everyone knew John LeCarre was a spy writer and that he was 'rather good'. Everyone--absolutely everyone--was aware of th...
Apparently, many people read John Le Carré’s spy novels for a glimpse at what the world of international espionage is really like; in other words, they read them like a kind of journalism about the shady world of Intelligence Services. And there certainly is something to it – we’ve grown used to ...
A lawyer from the London finance house of Single & Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was in business. A children's magician in the English countryside is asked by his bank to explain the unsolicited arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his...
"Leaving the envelope to mature for a week or two, therefore, he waits until the right number of tequilas has brought him to the right level of insouciance, and rips it open."Ted Mundy, Pakistan-born English major's son, Germanophile and student rebel, has just about settled into mediocrity at th...
Another classic espionage novel written in beautiful English. The narrator turns out to be Ned, the sympathetic, melancholy, Dutch-English head of the Russia House in the novel of the same name. And guess who appears next: dear old George Smiley, who gets an encore. I thought we had seen the last...
I've been watching Roberto Rossellini's The Age of the Medici this afternoon. Or about the middle two and a half hours of the four hour long 'mini-series'. I've been really enjoying it and surprisingly I haven't gotten too distracted watching it (this is something of a rarity for me in the past...
There are novels which can only be described by a single word: epic. John le Carre's A Perfect Spy, published originally in 1986, is one of those novels to be certain. It is a tale that stretches right across half the twentieth century in the form of the life of Magnus Pym, the perfect spy of the...
I cannot recall the exact age I was when I read this minimalist piece perfectly executed by the talented le Carré, but whatever is was—and around 15 years old sounds about right—it served as effective an eye-opener to reality as a set of clamps fixed upon what were previously orbs dreaming away b...
”What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrong...
The collection is sure to please avid LeCarre fans and new listeners alike. Includes: Night Manager, Tailor of Panama, and Our GameNight ManagerEnter the new world of post Cold War espionage. Penetrate the secret world of ruthless arms dealers and drug smugglers who have risen to unthinkable powe...
This omnibus includes "The Russia House", "The Secret Pilgrim" and "A Murder of Quality".
At the end of The Tailor Of Panama John Le Carré acknowledges his debt to a previous work that presented a similar theme, Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana. Both books are about the oxymoron that we call intelligence, so often self-contradictory because the label is only useful when there’s a lac...
Carne School, with its cloisters and woodworm and a line in the Doomsday Book, is one of the Great Schools, where the rich send their sons to be instructed. And it is from Carne that Miss Ailsa Brimley, editor of the small Christian Voice newspaper, receives a letter for the paper’s problem page....
The small town is Bad Godesburg, more a suburb of Bonn for diplomats in the fifties when Berlin was the divided city of intrigue but not the capital of the newly created West Germany. An Anglo German, Leo Harting, one of those children who were sent to England with only a luggage label for compan...
This is not, like I have seen claimed in several places, le Carré’s first novel that is not a spy thriller (there is also A Murder of Quality, which although it features George Smiley as its protagonist is not about espionage at all, but is a murder mystery) but his first (and possibly only, I ha...
Kevin Myers reviewed The Russia House on OfftheShelf.com. In Communist Russia, Spy Novel Reads YOU! by Kevin MyersEver since the Winter Olympics in Sochi and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I’ve become fascinated once again with the Russian people and culture. I was just a kid when The Russia House...
Magnus Pym, paradigma de espías, llega al límite de su resistencia y se aísla en un refugio secreto para analizar su vida en una larga carta dirigida a su hijo. Mientras, en el exterior, suenan las señales de alerta, y los recelos, sospechas y desconfianzas que forman el mundo del espionaje se ce...
The subtitle says it all - "Testing New drugs on the World's poorest Patients"This is a well written, brilliantly investigated expose of drug companies, the FDA, and contract research organizations (CROs) and how they conspire to seek out the most underprivileged among us to test new drugs for th...
By the changeful moonlight that has replaced the vanished sun, Perry discerns a bare-breasted Madonna surrounded by voluptuous angels in alluring poses. The tattoo descends from the tip of Dima’s massive shoulder to the gold wristband of his bejewelled Rolex watch.‘You wanna know who make this ta...
His name was Toby Bell and he was entirely alone in his criminal contemplations. No evil genius controlled him, no paymaster, provocateur or sinister manipulator armed with an attaché case stuffed with hundred-dollar bills was waiting round the corner, no activist in a ski mask. He was in that se...
He was the Russian police officer in charge of Crimes of Special Importance who in 1990 artfully coaxed a confession from the serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, a Ukrainian engineer with fifty-three victims to his name. Today, Kostoev is a tireless and outspoken member of the Russian parliament, urg...