约翰·勒卡雷,原名大卫·康威尔 David Cornwell,1931年生于英国。18岁便被英国军方情报单位招募,担任对东柏林的间谍工作;退役后在牛津大学攻读现代语言,之后于伊顿公学教授法文与德文。1959年进入英国外交部,同时开始写作。他以第三本著作《柏林谍影》一举 成名,知名小说家格林如此盛赞:“这是我读过的最好的间谍小说!”从此奠定文坛大师地位。
"I wrote The Spy Who Came in from the Cold at the age of thirty under intense, unshared, personal stress, and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues and much of the time to myself. I had written "
"The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion. Fifty years on, I don’t associate the book with anything that ever happened to me, save for one wordless encounter at London airport when a worn-out m"
"And the deep background of the novel? The sights, smells, and voices that, fifteen years after the end of the war, continued to infest every corner of divided Germany? The Berlin in which Leamas had his being was a paradigm of human folly and historical paradox. In the early Sixties, I had observed "
"The novel's merit, then — or its offense, depending where you stood — was not that it was authentic but that it was credible. The bad dream turned out to be one that a lot of people in the world were sharing since it asked the same old question that we are asking ourselves fifty years later: How far"
"There was a girl standing on the beach throwing bread to the sea gulls. Her back was turned to him. The sea wind played with her long black hair and pulled at her coat, making an arc of her body, like a bow strung toward the sea. He knew then what it was that Liz had given him; the thing that he wou"