ADAM SISMAN has once again written a postscript. His The Professor and the Parson (Books, 28 June 2019), about a historian’s intriguing pursuit of the doings of a clerical rogue, was a by-product of a life of Hugh Trevor-Roper (2010). Publication of the “secret annexe” to Sisman’s life (Books, 27 November 2015) of the spy novelist John le Carré (pseudonym of David Cornwell) has awaited the decease of both Cornwell and his widow, since its theme would have jeopardised their already skittish co-operation in the monumental earlier book.

The Secret Life of John le Carré is a catalogue of marital infidelity. This merited, in Sisman’s view, more than a second edition of the first book, partly because these were not merely passing flings, but a wide variety of affairs lubricating the novelist’s creative processes. After the end of his Intelligence career, they were his covert operations. Some of the women have talked insightfully; another, an admired humanitarian, died in a terrorist attack; one story, of a secretary, is distressing.

Sisman is the biographers’ biographer, with light to shed on that line of work. For husbands, his book is a guide to philandering and a reminder of how seedy and clichéd it will all look in the end, even if a devoted wife stays loyal. To le Carré fans, it may suggest why the women are sometimes the weakest link in his fiction.

Glyn Paflin is Deputy Editor of the Church Times.

The Secret Life of John le Carré
Adam Sisman
Profile Books £16.99
(978-1-80081-778-4)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29