Evasion and deception were essential weapons for me as a child. In adolescence we all become some kind of spies, but I was already a seasoned spy. When the secret world claimed me, I felt like I was coming home. From serving in British intelligence during the Cold War to a writing career that took him around the world, John Le Carré always wrote from the heart of modern times. In his memoir, which is incredibly entertaining and delightful, he reveals the multitude of hallucinatory and magnificent events he witnessed during his life. Whether he writes about the parrot in a hotel in Beirut that accurately imitates the firing of an automatic weapon and the first sounds of Beethoven's Fifth; about his visit to the museums of the unburied dead after the genocide in Rwanda; on New Year's Eve 1982 celebrations with Yasser Arafat and his senior commanders; about an interview with a German terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev; for the words of wisdom of the great physicist, regime opponent, Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov; About his meetings with two former heads of the KGB; and about his observation of Alec Guinness preparing to play the role of the famous spy George Smiley - Le Carré makes us smile and invites us to see the world around us with new eyes.
