The Friendship : Wordsworth and Coleridge

Sisman, Adam

Biographies & Memoirs

HarperPress

The Friendship

Arts & Literature

Harper-perennial

The definitive biography of the internationally adored author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and A Perfect Spy—arguably one of the most important and influential writers of the post-World War II period—by the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biographer Adam Sisman.
In this definitive biography—blessed by John le Carré himself—Adam Sisman reveals the man behind the bestselling persona. In John le Carré, Sisman shines a spotlight on David Cornwell, an expert at hiding in plain sight—“born to lying,” he wrote in 2002, “bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist.”
Of course, the pseudonym “John le Carré” has helped to keep the public at a distance. Sisman probes Cornwell’s unusual upbringing, abandoned by his mother at the age of only five and raised by his con man father (when not in prison), and explores his background in British intelligence, as well as his struggle to become a writer, and his personal life. Sisman has benefited from unfettered access to le Carré’s private archive, talked to the most important people in his life, and interviewed the man himself at length.
Who is John le Carré? Intriguing, thorough, and packed with entertaining detail, this biography will be a treat for the legions of le Carré fans.

John le Carre: The Biography

Harper

Harper Paperbacks

The extraordinary secret life of a great novelist, which his biographer could not publish while le Carré was alive. Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades. To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy - cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes. These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him. Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work. In trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer. While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known. Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed. The Secret Life of John le Carré&nbsp;reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject. "Now that he is dead," Sisman writes, "we can know him better."

The Secret Life of John le Carre

Humor & Entertainment

James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson is the most celebrated of all biographies, acknowledged as one of the greatest and most entertaining books in the English language. Yet Boswell himself has generally been considered little more than an idiot and condemned by posterity as a lecher and drunk. How could such a fool have written such a book? With great wit, Adam Sisman here tells the story of Boswell's presumptuous task-the making of the greatest biography of all time. Sisman traces the friendship between Boswell and Samuel Johnson, his great mentor, and provides a fascinating account of Boswell's seven-year struggle to write The Life of Samuel Johnson.

Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson

Penguin??Books

In Adam Sisman's previous book, the award-winning Boswell's Presumptuous Task, he inventively recounted the making of the most distinguished biography in the English language, James Boswell's Life of Johnson. Now, with The Friendship, Sisman details the relationship of two of the most important Romantic poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The first modern biography to consider them together, The Friendship is a wonderfully readable account that evokes these two extraordinary personalities and situates them in their time, exploring the influence each writer had on the other, as well as providing glimpses of the creative process itself.

The Friendship: Wordsworth & Coleridge

Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography

Historical

John le Carré is still at the top more than half a century after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold became a worldwide bestseller. Written with exclusive access to le Carré, his personal archives, and many of the people closest to him, Adam Sisman's definitive biography is a highly readable, fascinating portrait of the life, times and espionage career that inspired a literary master. Always secretive about his background and Secret Service career (blocking one biography from publication in the 1990s, then choosing a biographer who abandoned the project), John le Carré (David Cornwell) has finally given his blessing to Adam Sisman, who has delivered a biography that reads like a novel. From his bleak childhood--the departure of his mother when he was five was followed by "sixteen hugless years" in the dubious care of his father, a serial-seducer and con-man--through recruitment by both MI5 and MI6, his years as an agent for British Intelligence during the Cold War, to his emergence as the master of the espionage novel, le Carré has repeatedly quarried his life for his fiction. His acute psychological renderings of undercover operations and the moral ambiguities of the Cold War and our present-day politics lend his novels a level of credibility that is unmistakable. Sisman's great biography uncovers for us the remarkable story of an enigmatic writer whose commercial success has sometimes overshadowed appreciation for his extraordinary abilities.

John le Carré: The Biography

Knopf Canada

Vintage Canada

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