Showing posts with label John Le Carré. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Le Carré. Show all posts
Friday, September 11, 2026

A website on Alec Guinness's two BBC series as George Smiley

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Here's what we need: a website devoted to the BBC productions of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People . Gu...
Tuesday, May 05, 2026

"My name's Cole-Hamilton. Alex Cole-Hamilton"

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It's not just Ed Davey who was approached by MI6. Alex Cole-Hamilton reveals in a notably friendly interview in the Scottish Sun that ...
Wednesday, February 25, 2026

The Joy of Six 1480

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"The memoir shows that for Mandelson the cast of people who matter is very narrow, he is always the betrayed rather than the betrayer, ...
Thursday, November 20, 2025

The Joy of Six 1438

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Callum Miller , the party's foreign affairs spokesperson, sets out a Liberal Democrat approach to foreign policy: "Our economy is s...
Friday, October 17, 2025

Roger Hollis: The spy who never was?

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My memory of the Eighties is that Peter Wright was seen as being obsessive about Soviet infiltration of British intelligence. But didn't...
Monday, May 19, 2025

The Englishman in the High Castle

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An Englishman's Castle was a three-part BBC drama that starred Kenneth More and was screened in 1978. It was set in an alternate 1978 wh...
3 comments:
Saturday, May 17, 2025

St Paul's, Covent Garden: The Actors' Church

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"George Smiley! Oh, but you lovely, darling man!" Down in London on Thursday, I came across St Paul's, Covent Garden, which is...
Monday, December 02, 2024

"Ooh, Your Eminence!": A short review of Conclave (2024)

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If you enjoyed The Death of Stalin or the television adaptation of Tinker Tailor Solder Spy, you will enjoy Conclave - it's another film...
Monday, September 02, 2024

Spying: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

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I've just sent off another column to the JCPCP, so it's time to post another of my earlier ones. The idea that Noel Coward had a rol...
Thursday, April 25, 2024

Hooked on the livestream from the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

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Imagine a cross between Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the interview episode of The Apprentice. That's what you get from the hearings of ...
Tuesday, April 02, 2024

Bill Brand and The Nearly Man: When ITV screened drama series about British politics

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The death of the dramatist and screenwriter  Trevor Griffiths has reminded me of the Seventies, when British television companies showed po...
1 comment:
Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Books for Keeps interviews Malcolm Saville in 1980

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Books for Keeps, the magazine about children's books, launched in 1980 and interviewed Malcolm Saville the same year. Saville had only ...
Sunday, January 21, 2024

Ian Bannen in a Spaghetti Western with John Huston and the kid from Shane

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> Ian Bannen will always be Jim Prideaux from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to me, but he enjoyed a long and varied acting career. Here is on...
Thursday, December 07, 2023

Paddy Ashdown didn't have a British passport when he died

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Embed from Getty Images "I was a passionate European, I still am and so was Paddy. In fact when he died he didn’t have a British passpo...
2 comments:
Monday, October 23, 2023

The Joy of Six 1173

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"On New Year’s Day 1953, he signed up to become part of the greatest churn of young football talent English football had yet seen, the ...
1 comment:
Thursday, January 05, 2023

The Joy of Six 1101

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Neal Lawson believes there’s no point Labour winning the next election unless it acts to dismantle our toxic electoral system. "Truss ...
1 comment:
Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "Sir Percy Alleline is a fine upstanding fellow"

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I was rather pleased with this entry, and then I realised what a narrow audience it would appeal to. It's people who loved John Le Carré...
Sunday, September 18, 2022

Lord Bonkers' Diary: He's looking down on us and not saying a word about it

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Lord Bonkers is still bereft at the death of the Queen. "I can't start a new week of diaries on the day of her funeral," he so...
3 comments:
Saturday, June 18, 2022

Watch All Night and Barriers: Unscrambling my memories

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Having more or less vindicated my memory of having once heard a purported real "stone tape" on the radio, let me confess to a les...
Thursday, October 14, 2021

The Joy of Six 1029

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"Nearly three in four children’s homes and two in five fostering households are now provided by independent organisations, from both th...