Troubled spirit: John le Carré Credit: Hulton Archive John le Carré spent most of his childhood pining for his mother and much of his adult life wishing his father would disappear. In later life he stated frankly that the absence of one parent and the overbearing presence of the other were the key to understanding his life and his fiction. It is Ronnie and Olive Cornwell we have to thank for giving their son David the gifts and temperament that would transform him into John le Carré, the outstanding spy novelist of the 20th Century. His intertwined careers as an intelligence officer and as a writer seem, in retrospect, inevitable, given the events of his youth.