John le Carre: The writer who came in from the Cold War

By Nick Miller
Updated September 22 2017 - 8:01am, first published September 17 2017 - 12:31am

Recently, John le Carre found himself sitting in the bleak banality of an old Stasi interrogation room in Berlin. It wasn't much to look at: small, peeling linoleum, plain furniture. The horror comes from imagining the psychological torture inside those walls a generation ago.