Sir Paul Lever
“ The Secret Pilgrim by John le Carré is more a collection of vignettes than a novel. George Smiley, the principal character in most of his early books, comes back from retirement to talk to new British Intelligence Service recruits about the business of spying. What follows is a series of stories about espionage during the Cold War and how it affected the agents involved.
“It came out in 1990, as the Cold War was ending, when I was in Vienna negotiating an arms treaty with the Soviet Union. I was never a spook, but as the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, I was what you might call a spymaster. The Secret Pilgrim is the best book I’ve read about what it was like.