Back to the fabulous Fifties

Charlotte Bingham has had an extraordinary writing career. She wrote her first book, Coronet Among the Weeds (newly republished by Bloomsbury), when she was just 19. It was a memoir of her life as a 1950s debutante — the ‘weeds’ were the chinless wonders she met at debs’ dances — and it became an instant hit in 1963. She then wrote another 33 bestselling novels and co-wrote, with her husband Terence Brady, various TV series, including Upstairs Downstairs. But when he was dying of cancer two years ago, she suddenly skipped back to the 1950s and picked up the story of Coronet Among the Weeds where it left off. The result was a very surprising memoir called MI5 and Me, published last year, to which Spies and Stars is the follow-up.

She mentioned in Coronet Among the Weeds that her father was a Lord — the 7th Baron Clanmorris. What she didn’t tell us was that, as John Bingham, he was a section head of MI5 and the model for John le Carré’s George Smiley.