| John le Carré Illustration by T.A. |
John le Carré remembered by writers and friends: 'He always had a naughty twinkle in the eye'
Part Two
Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Tom Stoppard, Ralph Fiennes, John Boorman and more pay tribute to a master who transcended the limits of spy fiction
Monday 14 December 2020
Philippe Sands, lawyer and author
We first met at the local pub, bonded over the mendacities of the “war on terror” and Iraq, and ended up giving a talk at a local school in the company of a former Guantánamo detainee. I learned that his attention to detail, and capacity for research, was beyond extraordinary; I didn’t hesitate when he asked if I might review a manuscript to check if the lawyers were “right”. (Dress, lingo, style, etc.) It became a regular thing: the doorbell; him, standing on the porch; hundreds of pages in a cardboard box; “usual procedure?” What a joy to receive the unvarnished words, double-spaced, printed only on one side, and the conversations that followed. (Unbelievably, in the early years my wife gave the drafts to our kids as scrap paper.) “No lawyer would refer to her client as ‘heart’,” I might scribble, or some such thing, polite in the early days, firmer as the years passed, then deliver the relevant pages back to their house around the corner. Occasionally there would be a debate, sometimes pretty spirited. He’d usually take a suggestion, but not always. “Heart” never did make it into that book, thankfully, although he insisted for ever that he did once hear a lawyer use the expression, “truly, a term of genuine endearment”.