'Mole': Le Carré's Fiction Burrows Its Way Into the Real World
Dec. 17, 2020 6:28 pm ET Linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer analyzes the origins of words in the news. Read previous columns here. When the British spy novelist John le Carré died last Saturday, many obituaries noted how his gripping tales of Cold War espionage were informed by his own experiences in the U.K. intelligence agency MI5. His firsthand knowledge of spycraft provided verisimilitude for those bestselling works, beginning with âThe Spy Who Came in From the Coldâ in 1963. That verisimilitude extended to the jargon of spying in his novels, which had the ring of ...
Source: wsj.com