There’s no trace of religion in George Smiley, the short, overweight, expensively and badly dressed Cold War spymaster who was the late John le Carré’s most memorable creation. Smiley – and his thick glasses – were partly inspired by the medieval historian Vivian Green, the chaplain at Sherborne, where le Carré (then David Cornwell) spent three miserable years. After the war, le Carré was persuaded to return to Oxford by Green, now the chaplain of Lincoln College.

Le Carré said Smiley was a composite of Green and a fellow intelligence officer, John Bingham. In one of his first postings, at the British embassy in Bonn in the early 1960s, le Carré worked with David Goodall, the ex-Ampleforth diplomat-spy with some Wexford blood. Born within 10 days of each other, they remained friends after le Carré became a full-time writer. Goodall, short of stature, shrewd, monk-ish and slightly owlish in appearance, was the diplomat who somehow managed to shepherd an unwilling Thatcher into signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. He went on to be High Commissioner to India and then a book reviewer for The Tablet for many years until his death in 2016. Perhaps there’s a dab of Goodall, too, in Smiley.