Le Carr?'s life is chronicled in A Private Spy over the course of seven decades, along with the terrible periods he witnessed. It starts with his early years in the 1940s and continues with stories about his National Service, his time at Oxford, and his days at Eton instructing the "chinless, pointy-nosed gooseberry-eyed British lords." It talks about his joining MI5, the establishment of the Iron Curtain, and the emergence of his literary career in response to the construction of the Berlin Wall. Through his letters, he takes us on a journey from the Second World War era to the present day. Le Carr? is seen writing to Sir Alec Guinness to get him to play George Smiley, and later arguing the immorality of the War on Terror with the chief of the German internal security service. What emerges is a portrait not only of the writer, or of the global intellectual, but, in his own words, of the very private, very passionate and very real man behind the name.