“The formative moment in my life where I was actually learning to speak, was learning to use language, I was getting 90 minutes or more of George Smiley in my ear every day,” he said. “And so when I came to sit down to do this, I found that I did not have to turn the dial very far to find a voice that is absolutely my own, but which reads to people as being sufficiently of the le Carré mood.”