Smiley's secret

The people and stories behind le Carré's spying novels

- Richard Norton-Taylor

Lamplighters, pavement artists, babysitters - they have taken on whole new meanings thanks to John le Carré.

As his fans will know, they are part of the "tradecraft" practised by the spies he wrote about so evocatively. Now, almost five years after his death, an exhibition titled Tradecraft reveals the techniques and motivations of the characters' creator, whose real name was David Cornwell.

At the entrance to the exhibition in Oxford University's Bodleian Library is a large portrait of Cornwell looking straight ahead with piercing eyes, his chin resting on his hands. It is accompanied by two of his quotes. One says: "I am not a spy who writes novels, I am a writer who briefly worked in the secret world." The second, after questioning whom, if anyone, we can trust, continues: "What is loyalty - to ourselves, to whom, to what? Whom, if anyone, can we love? And what is the caring individual's relationship to the institutions he services?"