Refreshingly unfettered: LRB Podcast’s Close Readings on Patricia Highsmith

I’d forgotten what a rich and deep and characterful voice John le Carré had. Listening to author and lawyer Philippe Sands’s Archive on 4 programme on him last week, I was struck by how much more engaging it was than almost every other male voice on the radio these days. Le Carré’s weren’t simply the measured tones of a mid–century public schoolboy. There was a real spirit in his voice, something melodic, which, in a world of Nick Grimshaws and Greg Jameses, stopped me in my tracks.

Le Carré’s voice was undoubtedly part of the armoury that enabled him to win people over, even ‘to manipulate crowds’. This, his youngest son, the writer Nick Harkaway, told Sands was an ability he had inherited from his own father, the notoriously dodgy Ronnie. An associate of the Kray twins, Ronnie was something of a smoothie, with a shameless habit of autographing his son’s books as ‘the author’s father’ to sell on.