Le Carré, Bacchae and radical feminist punk art – what to see and watch this week

We would like to thank Naomi Joseph for the contribution to this article.

John le Carré was a master of the spy novel – not by glamorising espionage, but by stripping it of illusion. His stories abandoned the trope of the suave, heartless agent in favour of morally complex characters navigating the shadowy ethics of Cold War intelligence. Gritty, ambiguous and deeply human, his thrillers elevated the spy genre to literary art.

Much of that authenticity came from le Carré’s own experience in British counterintelligence with MI5. But as a new exhibition at Oxford’s Bodleian libraries reveals, his success was just as rooted in painstaking research, interviews and relentless editing.

John le Carré: Tradecraft offers a rare look into the creative process behind nine of his novels. On display