John Le Carré, undisputed  master of the spy novel, who has just died at 89, was the great chronicler of Cold War Britain who himself never quite came in from the cold. He was in his writing, and much of his life, the insider’s outsider and the outsider’s insider.

He had a difficult childhood, son of a very violent but charming conman. He quit public school in Dorset to study German in Bern , which drew him into the world of MI6 espionage and surveillance. From this he learned to keep his counsel, and living a multi-layered life.

This made him demanding and stimulating in conversation. I had three long discussions with him over the years – they were always stimulating, demanding, and with a wickedly malicious wit. He was a fabulous mimic – especially of Sir Alec Guinness who defined on the screen the greatest character he created for the page, the soft-spoken, fat and feline spymaster George Smiley.

Smiley appears in the very first Le Carré Novel ‘Call for the Dead’. “He’s there fully formed in a single paragraph on the first page,”  Richard Osmond said recently on Radio 4 describing it as masterpiece of character description.

By the time of publication, David Cornwell, Le Carré’s real name, was an MI6 officer working variously in Hamburg and Bonn. It was followed quickly by ‘A Murder of Quality’ in which the public school setting was based on the author’s two year stint teaching at Eton. James Mason played Smiley in the film, incongruously but quite successfully.

The Le Carré pen name had been assumed to allow him to write and continue to work in Intelligence – for both MI5 and MI6.  The appearance of “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” in 1963 blew the whole game. The book became such a hit, he had to leave the intelligence services . Within two years it was made into a successful film with Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, the down at heel washed up spy of the title.

The security services passed the book for publication because they claimed it bore no correspondence to reality. Critics and readers thought otherwise. For Graham Greene it ‘was the greatest spy story ever written’ and as much and more than Greene himself Le Carré brought spy stories into the mainstream of English Literature.

The Smiley books depict a complete world of spies and operators, the ‘lamplighter’s’ , ‘pavement men’ the ‘Circus’ . The characters are fully rounded, their personal flaws and betrayals the reflection of the shadow war they are fighting. They are men and women who might have rubbed shoulders with the likes of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, duplicitous and deceptive at home and abroad.

This world was most brilliantly realised for the screen in the 1979 television adaption of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”, the most expansive of the Smiley novels. Directed by John Irvin for the BBC  it brought us not only Guinness as Smiley, one of his career greatest roles , but Ian Richardson, Beryl Reid and Ian Holm as stalwarts of the spooks’ ‘Circus,’ at the heart of the Secret Intelligence Service.

The novels also had a powerful sense of place . “A Small Town in Germany” is to this day the best description of Cold War Bonn.

The rewards of the novels and films allowed him to put some order in the chaos around his wider family , largely wrought by his father, Ronnie, a convicted fraudster and bankrupt. Ronnie is the powerful presence in three of the later novels, and a memoir. He left two wives in the lurch, and with them five children.

It led to David Cornwell leaving school early and having to quit Oxford halfway – though he returned a year or so later to get a First in Modern Languages in just one year. David used his fortune to help particularly his younger half siblings, Rupert, the brilliant Independent Correspondent, and Charlotte the actress. He also supported their mother, his stepmother, Jean Neal – who was almost like one of his own fictional characters, though of an earlier generation.  Though barely out of her teens, during the Blitz she drove an ambulance at night while working as a BBC Imperial and Overseas Service announcer for a day job. “She was one of a really feisty generation of young women who were offered few opportunities but just took life head-on,” he told me at her funeral.

Rupert Cornwell was one of my greatest friends – sharing our time of fifty years in in journalism. The brothers had great mutual respect; they could certainly match each other in sheer elegance of writing — though for me nothing rivals the sheer panache, Italian disinvoltura, of Rupert’s columns and sketches at their best. At Rupert’s memorial three years ago, David gave the most extraordinarily eloquent and moving tribute to his brother. In it he revealed how they had all endured the appaling violence of their father towards their families, mainly their mothers. Ronnie certainly knew the thuggish end of the underworld; he was a sometime associate of the Kray brothers.

With “The Honourable Schoolboy,” he moved away from Smiley’s Whitehall and Iron Curtain Europe to South East Asia of the Vietnam. Cambodia, Laos conflicts. Here he became fascinated by the Gonzo school of  Vietnam war journalism. Reporting was another enduring fascination. We met for a long interview about the book for Corriere della Sera. It turned into one of the most memorable two to three hour conversations I have ever enjoyed.

He talked to me about the psychological mechanism of loyalty, trust and betrayal – enduring themes of all his books. He was fascinating about risk and courage, and trust and loyalty among reporters on the road. Fortunately, the term hack hadn’t been reinvented then; it was five years before the Falklands War. He was skeptical about cosy relations between journalists of the ‘security lobby’ and the intelligence chiefs, with particular scepticism about the ‘Monday lunch’ briefings of the chosen few at the SIS headquarters, to which he had been invited on occasion . These encounters and the supper briefings between MI5 and MI6 and their chosen from the BBC , Guardian, Times and Telegraph, to name a few, were deeply suspect he suggested.

Looking at the debacle in Vietnam and Cambodia, he was worried about the blatant Americanophilia of so much of the British press. “They don’t treat America as a foreign country, because they want to be Americans.” For him it must have been galling – for he and his brother Rupert spoke some half a dozen European languages well, some flawlessly.

The abiding memory I have of that encounter in 1977 is what tremendous performer David was. He loved mimicry, the different voices of every one of his characters , real and imagined. He had a precise, slightly sibilant delivery, remarkably like his brother Rupert, which could move from trenchant satire, to winsome deprecation of self and others with just the slightest touch of campery.

This was acknowledged in an interesting first by the BBC. David Cornwell was the first author on Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime to read his own work. He did it brilliantly – never surpassed . This week we now have Barrack Obama following his lead in reading for the Book of the Week slot.

The stiletto wit and joyous turn of phrase coloured our second long conversation, which was memorable we both agreed because latterly we could remember almost nothing about it. We met for lunch to discuss a possible novel set in the wars of the breakup of Yugoslavia, mainly Bosnia. The talk went on for hours , anecdotes pinging off the walls. At home that afternoon his wife Jane remarked on his exceptionally good mood – had he had a good lunch? “Yes, with Foxy, it was great fun. But I can’t remember a thing we talked about.”

Part of the reason, I suspect, was the messy crossroads of Bosnia and Kosovo’s wars, still not over. They were a playout from the end of the Cold War, and the beginnings of the intrusions of entities such as al Qaeda and other jihadi elements. (Some of the gang behind 9/11 were in a compound we checked out in Zenitsa – if only we knew it, one of the strangest reporting ‘what ifs’ in the whole Balkans fiasco). The Cold War was familiar territory for David Cornwell, but the new Jihadis were not. Later I heard that he tried a Bosnia novel , but after a draft or two abandoned the project.

Not that he was stuck on the familiar themes, the  murky world of  Cold War Britain and its intrigues – of which he was master as Dickens was of street level Victorian London. He took the Lebanese civil war as context for ‘The Little Drummer Girl’, tackled the malfeasance of Big Pharma in ‘The Constant Gardener,’ wrote successful screenplays and encouraged new writers like Ben Macintyre.

He also became more politically outspoken in print and on platforms. He denounced the misuse and misdirections of Intelligence by the Blair George W Bush governments over the Iraq adventure in 2003. He seemed sustained by a form of royal rage about Brexit Britain – despite being quite ill these past few years.

But George Smiley kept returning – making his last appearance between hardcovers in 2017. Smiley was not really a Le Carré / David Cornwell alter ego, save in one or two attributes. But he was the confidant and guide in the collection of stories by which his creator set out to chronicle Cold War Britain and Europe.

In our long conversation of more than forty years ago, David Cornwell spoke of his admiration for Honoré de Balzac in ‘La Comedie Humane,’ the teeming characters and scenes by which he portrayed the France of his times. In his way he was trying to do the same through the prism of tangled human relations in the world of  intelligence for postwar London and Britain.

In a dozen or two of brilliant stories, memoirs and essays, he succeeded more brilliantly than he might have recognised himself.