The Man Who Was George Smiley: The Life of John Bingham

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Description

John le Carr's intellectual hero George Smiley has come to be seen as the perfect spy. Le Carr has revealed that the model for Smiley was the author and MI5 officer John Bingham, the 7th Baron Clanmorris. Michael Jago's brilliant account of Bingham's life is not just the story of a perfect spy, it is also of a writer whose thrillers transcended the genre, exploring the emotions behind the darkest human behaviour. As an intelligence officer the bespectacled Bingham had a deep influence on Le Carr, then a junior colleague in MI5. Like Smiley, Bingham was an expert interrogator. His understanding of the human psyche, demonstrated so brilliantly in his seventeen novels, persuaded his subjects to give up the intelligence they were holding deep inside.

Reviews

'Competent and fluent, prone to such smooth sentences as 'The greatest irony is that it was to George Smiley, modelled largely on Bingham, that le Caree owed his success.' London Review of Books

Author Bio

MICHAEL JAGO is an Englishman based in Chicago and south-west France. He holds an honours degree from University College, Oxford in Greats and has published and edited a number of journals. Westminster