In John le Carré’s 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, an intelligence officer named Alec Leamas is thrown out of MI6, takes a job at a library, loses himself in drink and is sent to prison for assaulting a shopkeeper. When he emerges from jail, he is approached by a member of the East German intelligence service, the Abteilung, and travels to Holland, where he agrees  to work as a double agent. Le Carré’s precision-engineered story is rightly regarded as a masterpiece, but it would have been almost impossible to construct had the author been writing in the age of the internet, … Continue reading Has the Spy State Killed the Spy Novel?