John le Carré at his home in London, 2019. Credit…Charlotte Hadden for The New York Times.

This morally murky world of spying is where le Carré continues to make his literary mark.

John le Carré’s 25th novel, “Agent Running in the Field,” was published on October 22, 2019. It came two years after the 88-year-old author’s last novel, “A Legacy of Spies.”

In the late 1950s le Carré taught foreign languages at Eton, Britain’s most elite all-boys’ boarding school. It gave him insight into a culture that has provided Britain with a production line of Old Etonian politicians, including [Boris] Johnson. “I’ve taught a dozen Johnsons,” le Carré says. “Eton does something extraordinary. It doesn’t teach you to govern. It teaches you to win. That’s what it’s about.”

Floreat Etona: “May Eton Flourish” (School motto).

… “[Brexit] began in the big landed houses of England,” he says. “That’s where the Brexit fantasy, the nostalgia for the suspicion of your German and your Frenchman and those chaps who weren’t much use in the war, that’s where that was born.”

(Tobias Grey, “Tinker, Tailor, Writer, Spy,” NYTimes, 10-12-19)

(c) 2019 JMN