From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion, to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, John le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive - reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire, or visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide, or celebrating New Year's Eve with Yasser Arafat, or interviewing a German terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev, or watching Alec Guinness preparing for his role as George Smiley, or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in his The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humour, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.

約翰·勒卡雷

John le Carré

原名大衛·康威爾（David Cornwell），1931年生於英國。曾就讀於伯爾尼大學和牛津大學，在伊頓公學教授過法文與德文。18歲被英國軍方情報單位招募，擔任對東柏林的間諜工作；1958年就職於英國安全局軍情五處，同時開始寫作。1963年，第三本小說《柏林諜影》問世，知名小說傢格雷厄姆·格林盛贊：“這是我讀過的最好的間諜小說！”由此奠定文壇大師地位，並轉為全職寫作。在過去的50年中，勒卡雷居留於倫敦與康沃爾郡，筆耕不輟，迄今共著小說25部，有4部入選美國推理作傢協會（MWA）“百佳犯罪推理小說”，3部入選MWA十大流派名作排行榜“十佳間諜小說”，獲奬無數，被《泰晤士報》評為“1945年以來50位最偉大的英國作傢”之一，也被西方評論界譽為“在世最好的英語小說傢之一”。