Le Carré, the pen name of David Cornwell, worked for the British Foreign Service, running his own spies, in the 1940s and 1950s. Then came the George Smiley books, including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and le Carré’s career rocketed up. He best “explored the gap between the west’s high-flown rhetoric of freedom and the gritty reality of defending it, in novels such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Night Manager, which gained him critical acclaim and made him a bestseller around the world.” – The Guardian (UK)