Exhibition shows tools of trade used by meticulous master of spy writing

John le Carré: Tradecraft
Bodleian Weston Library, Oxford
Wednesday, October 8
To Monday, April 6, 2026

IN 2006 Richard Ovenden, head librarian at the Bodleian, wrote to John le Carré asking whether he might consider bequeathing his papers to the Oxford University library.

Le Carré — real name David Cornwell — replied with enthusiasm. He could think of nothing better, he said, than to have his papers at Oxford, which he regarded as George Smiley’s “spiritual home”.

There were 1,237 boxes of material, delivered in two tranches to the library, the last after the author’s death in 2020.

John le Carré was the most acclaimed and successful spy writer of the last half-century and it’s not overstating things to say that his work has national status, influencing the way we see ourselves as well as the way others see us.

The Bodleian le Carré collection isn’t just a resource for academics and researchers but a gift to the general public, as shown by this detailed and generous “Tradecraft” exhibition at the Weston Library.

The title is a nod to the espionage techniques which John le Carré made famous in novels like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Readers and viewers quickly grew to know the secret world of the Circus, with its moles and lamplighters and scalphunters. Grew to know it with that mixture of love and loathing which is rather the attitude of the creator himself. The exhibition title is also a tribute to le Carré’s meticulous working methods and it was this that really struck me as I looked at displays highlighting both the author’s life and the parallel existence of some of his key books. He was, above all, a professional. Not a spy, he said, “but a writer who briefly worked in the secret world”.

Research was a serious undertaking. He visited trouble-torn places in the Middle East, Asia and so on which he planned to use as settings — for le Carré, setting was not a backdrop but essentially another character. He sought out experts, informants and tell-tales. His techniques as a writer were very spy-like, in fact.

He wrote out drafts by hand, then corrected and recorrected with stapled and sellotaped sections, examples of which are on show.

Tribute is paid to his wife Jane — long-suffering in some respects — who typed up everything that he wrote. The exhibition includes tools of the trade: a pen and a “writing cushion” on which he rested his left arm at the desk. “Tradecraft” provides a glance at some of the many films and television versions which have been created from his work. And as a coda to the exhibition, visitors can look at some of the talented sketches and illustrations which Cornwell/le Carré was producing from his student days onwards.

Most curiously, the future spy writer did some drawings for a book called Talking Birds by Maxwell Knight. Knight was a naturalist. He was also the spymaster known as M.

Philip Gooden