In the mid 1960s, two novelists—John le Carré and Graham Greene—met for drinks, food, and conversation. Le Carré’s fiction has been compared to Joseph Conrad’s and even more to Greene’s. These writers each favor bleak portrayals of intelligence bureaucracies populated with agents who lack a moral compass or who are willing to suppress their ethics to achieve dubious ends. Greene’s and le Carré’s friendship turned sour because the two writers disagreed pointedly about Harold Adrian “Kim” Philby, perhaps the most notorious British Secret Service official turned Soviet double agent. For le Carré, Philby exemplified “the neo-Fascist instincts of a slightly berserk English gentleman” whose treachery arose from “the Establishment’s easy trick of rationalizing…
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Citation: Beene, LynnDianne. "The Human Factor". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 September 2020 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13316, accessed 21 November 2024.]
