The critical reception of John le Carre's first work of fiction was mixed and typically British: he was flogged. "When I was about 10 or 11," he recalls, "I wrote a story about a jockey who loaded his whip with lead and beat the horse to run faster. The headmaster had a secretary who took me under her wing, and she agreed to type the story out because I thought it should be immortalized. And the headmaster discovered that I was giving work to his secretary and flogged me for it. He had a riding crop, and it made a hell...
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