On the avenue his own pace slowed. Instinctively he began to practise tradecraft, or writing craft. He became observant, guarded, watchful, keeping to the edge of the path where the undergrowth slightly obscured him. Writers and spies shared the same "corrosive eye", as Graham Greene put it: that wish to penetrate the surface to the centre and truth of things. In fact he had not been in "the circus" for long; just a few years, running low-grade agents into eastern Europe and then working out of the British embassy in Bonn, before Kim Philby, a celebrated double agent, exposed him. He was a writer who, very briefly, had been a spy.

Yet he felt he had been recruited to the secret world from childhood, as Conrad was to the sea. He had acquired the comforting habit of cover-stories to try to account for a father who was in jail one moment and at Ascot the next: an epic conman from whom his mother bolted when he was five. He had joined the secret service for all kinds of romantic reasons, to do some good for society, and to discover how the world was really run; but also because he felt corporate attachment offered him a family's protection.

To some extent it did. But he soon found with Alec Leamas, the pretend defector whom Smiley in "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" sent into East Germany and ultimately to his death, that spies were not priests or saints, but "a squalid procession of vain fools, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives". In the cold war Western agents, aping Soviet ones, walked on the thinnest moral ice. It often broke.

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