A Private Spy: The letters of John le Carre review - these letters shed light on a a complex literary and public figure

Tim Cornwell, David's son, who died shortly after writing the introduction to A Private Spy, uses the pen name le Carré for Cornwell throughout the text, given reader familiarity with the name, although almost all of the letters are signed "as ever David".

The selected letters, which fill 632 pages, follow le Carré's life from his troubled childhood to Oxford, MI6 and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), which led to nearly 60 years in the public eye after its publication made him a global best-selling author, who "defined the Cold War era and spoke truth to power". Another son, Nick, has called le Carré's life "a journey from wolf child to national treasure".

The early letters are often more personally revealing than the later ones, in which le Carré is conscious of autobiographical legacy: "I have decided to cultivate that intense, worried look and to start writing brilliant, untidy letters for future biographers".

Le Carré is notably more assertive when commenting on other people, particularly politicians. Tony Blair, whom le Carré detested after the Iraq war intervention, is "self-delusional, self-loving, self-serving and self-forgiving", while for Boris Johnson, "cowardice & bullying go hand-in-hand" and Trump is "a thin-skinned, truthless, vengeful, pitiless ego-maniac".

A Private Spy is a comprehensive supplement to Adam Sisman's 2015 excellent biography and le Carré's 2016 own collection of autobiographical essays, The Pigeon Tunnel. Le Carré saw Sisman's biography as being too intrusive, although Sisman muted his coverage of le Carré's numerous affairs. He once told his brother Tony, "My love life has always been a disaster area" and later apologised for being "neither a model husband nor a model father".

Tim Cornwell only includes "a smattering of letters to his lovers", which include Susan Anderson, a museum curator and Yvette Pierpaoli, an aid worker to whom The Constant Gardener was dedicated. Since le Carré's death, however, his affairs have become more widely discussed, largely because of le Carré's self-styled mistress, Suleika Dawson's 2022 book, Secret Heart: John le Carré, An Intimate Memoir, which revealed her two-year affair with le Carré in the early 1980s.

When 52-year-old Le Carré met Oxford graduate Suleika, who was in her early 20s, le Carré had been married to his second wife Jane for 11 years. His first marriage in 1954 to Ann, he later described as a silly mistake. Ann became the name of George Smiley's enigmatic, unfaithful, wife in the Smiley novels.

Le Carré was unfaithful to Jane numerous times but she was indispensable to him as his editorial assistant, "the crucial, covert collaborator" in the words of their son Nicholas.

Jane died only two months after her husband. The last letter in the book is a an undated handwritten note from le Carré to Jane that begins: "You are the only woman".

One of the models for George Smiley was his Oxford tutor, the Reverend Vivian Green, who helped le Carré financially with his fees in one of Ronnie Cornwall's periods of bankruptcy.

The charismatic, but criminally flawed, Ronnie was to haunt le Carré throughout his life. Le Carré's trauma is first revealed in letters at boarding school when Ronnie tried to pay the school fees with black market goods instead of cash.

Ronnie appears in fictional depiction in several le Carré novels, notably A Perfect Spy (1986) and Single and Single (1999).

In the letters, le Carré engages in entertaining fashion with fans, publishers, directors, actors and politicians. In later correspondence, le Carré rails against Britain's subservience to the USA, global capitalism, multinational corruption and Brexit , "an act of economic suicide mounted by charlatans", which led him to take up Irish citizenship just before his death.

He wasn't always popular with the Western "craven intelligence services", whom he said were being influenced by "a handful of jingoistic adventurers and imperialist fantasists, backed by a lot of dark money and manipulation: populism led from above".

Le Carré once called himself "a mole too used to the dark to believe in light" but certainly Sisman's biography, Dawson's memoir and now Tim Cornwell's compilation of the letters, full of rage, compassion and insights, shed significant light on a complex literary and public figure.

An added bonus are le Carré's illustrations and caricatures, peppered throughout the book.