Review: Michael Idov on John le Carré

The name “John le Carré” evokes, alongside some very specific imagery (smoke, fog, cobblestone, codebook, desperate men in crumpled suits), a tedious argument that has flared up with some regularity over sixty-odd years now: is he the most major of genre writers, in his case, the spy thriller, or the most minor of the all-time titans?

This dichotomy is n…