Some 40 years ago, before MI6 chiefs could be embarrassed by their wives putting holiday snaps on Facebook — when, indeed, there was no Facebook and MI6 itself was a state secret — John le Carr? was drawing on his own service in it to create some of Britain’s most successful postwar novels, and the quiet, cunning, meticulous agent George Smiley.
Television, cinema and radio have each previously adapted one or more of the Smiley books, but Radio 4 has now gone a step further and is dramatising all eight of them. The sequence began in May with the first one, Call for the Dead, and will end next April with the last, The Secret Pilgrim. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is