Page 6 - Robert Mccrum News Today

by Pen Vogler (Atlantic £20, 480 pp) ‘Tell me what you eat,’ pronounced 19th-century French gastronome Brillat-Savarin, ‘and I will tell you what you are.’ In Britain, few things better reveal our place in the nation’s complex class structure than our eating habits. When do you eat ‘dinner’? At midday or in the early evening? Why did the avocado become such a signifier of ‘middle class’? How did oysters, food of the poor in Victorian England, become a delicacy for the better ...

John le Carré, bestselling author of Cold War thrillers, passes away at 89 Writer Graham Greene called John le Carrés “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” featuring the plump, ill-dressed George Smiley, the greatest spy story he had ever read. New York Times December 14, 2020 / 07:31 AM IST John le Carré in London on October 6, 2009 (Image by David Azia © 2020 The New York Times) John le Carré, whose exquisitely nuanced, intricately plott...

Born: October 19th, 1931 Died: December 12th, 2020 John le Carré, whose exquisitely nuanced, intricately plotted cold-war thrillers elevated the spy novel to high art by presenting both western and Soviet spies as morally compromised cogs in a rotten system full of treachery, betrayal and personal tragedy, died on Saturday in Cornwall, England. He was 89. Before le Carré published his bestselling 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which Graham Greene called “the best s...