Night Waves - John le Carre special

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2013

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a special event recorded in front of an audience at London's Royal College of Music Anne McElvoy talks to John le Carré to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his groundbreaking Cold War espionage novel, The Spy who Came in from the Cold. It's the book which brought him international fame and which was described by Graham Greene as 'the best spy story I have ever read'. He discusses his extraordinary childhood as well as the state of Britain today, and the revelations of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds.
0:32.1	This is a download from the BBC. For more information and our terms of use, go to BBC.co.uket-Uk slash radio three.
0:40.5	John LeCare's name dominates spy fiction over the last half century.
0:44.9	His geopolitical range is extraordinary.
0:47.3	It covers the fierce secret combat of the Cold War and its impact on the societies who fought it,
0:53.1	as well as the Russia of Perestroika,
0:55.2	Latin America's skirmishes with American power, the moral quandaries of drug companies in Africa,
1:00.9	and most recently the ethical dilemmas thrown up in a turbulent world.
1:05.6	It's 50 years since Le Carre gave us his absorbing, compromised world of espionage in the spy who came in from the
1:11.5	cold, with its cast of flawed and opportunist characters robed in the grandeur of the Cold War.
1:17.9	That and the many novels that have followed have won him a global audience of devoted readers,
1:23.2	many in countries previously behind the Iron Curtain, which once separated his best-known character
1:28.5	Smiley in his lair at the circus from his enemy, the Soviet spy chief Carla.
1:34.6	Le Carre hasn't been shy of commenting on real-life events either since the fall of the Berlin Wall
1:39.7	as a vocal critic of American and British policy in the War on Terror.
1:44.4	His latest novel, A Delicate Truth, takes us into the ethical conundrums of intelligence
1:49.1	in a world more complex and arguably more unsettling than the divisions of superpower strife.
1:55.6	Please welcome John McCarray and our reader John Shrapnel.
2:10.9	Thank you. and our reader, John Shrapnel. John, give us a picture of the world in 1963, as you saw it when the spy who came in from the cold was published.
2:18.1	Yes, I'd like to do that. We were 15 years after the end of the hot war.
	...

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