The watchful scribbler; John le Carre. | The Economist
" ... The players changed, the game went on. He had focused on the cold war from the 1960s because it was the overriding drama of the age. Others quickly succeeded it: the arms trade ("The Night Manager"), the war on terror ("Absolute Friends"), Big Pharma's misdeeds in Africa ("The Constant Gardener"). Trump's America and Johnson's Britain, with their spoon-fed media and nationalistic duping of the public, appalled him equally. Each deserved excoriation in a book in which the characters acted out a global argument, just as the closed society of spies had been, for him, a theatre of the world ... "