John le Carre’s life in dates

LONDON: Key dates in the life of John le Carre:

● Oct 19, 1931: Born David Cornwell in the southern English coastal town of Poole in Dorset.

●1936: Olive Cornwell flees the family home, leaving the young le Carre to be raised by his father Ronnie, a tyrant and conman who was jailed twice for fraud.

● 1948 to 1956: Studies French and German in Bern in Switzerland, where he begins his espionage career, before moving to Oxford.

● 1954: Marries Alison Sharp, with whom he has three sons before their divorce in 1971.

● 1958: Starts working for MI5, British Security Service, and writes ‘Call for the Dead’, his first novel.

● 1960: Begins working for MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, while Second Secretary of the British Embassy in Bonn, West Germany.

● 1963: Publication of ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’, his second novel and his first written using his John le Carre pen name.

● 1964: Forced to resign from MI6 after his identity is compromised by double agent Kim Philby, and from this point devotes himself completely to writing.

● 1974: Publication of ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, the first installment of le Carre’s magnum opus Karla trilogy, followed by ‘The Honourable Schoolboy’ in 1977 and ‘Smiley’s People’ in 1979.

● January 2003: publishes in The Times a diatribe against Bush’s America entitled ‘The United States has gone mad’.

● 2017: Publication of ‘A Legacy of Spies’, his 24th novel.

● October 2019: Publication of his final novel ‘Agent Running in the Field’.

● December 12, 2020: Dies of pneumonia in Cornwall.