We’re talking via video call, with Simon in a hotel room in Budapest, and his youngest brother, the novelist Nick Harkaway (his pen name) – from le Carré’s second marriage, to book editor Jane Eustace, in 1972 – on a separate screen. But ultimately, was she forgiving of him? Absolutely.” Was my mum angry, upset? Of course she was, and ultimately, they decided they couldn’t live together. And who came to my mum because she was the only person who would understand what they were going through.

The film producer Simon Cornwell, 65, le Carré’s eldest son from his 1954 marriage to Ann Sharp, tells me, “Two of my mum’s closest friends over the years were people with whom my dad had had quite intense relationships. Yet “Dawson”, an audiobook abridger at the time of the original two-year affair (there was a later six-month reprise), was just one of le Carré’s many infidelities, even though she claims to be “the love of his life”. The memoir features lurid tales of marathon sex sessions – she describes the first time they went to bed as the “sex that only the hero and heroine can have sex for the cameras, sex for the gods” – and talks about the way in which le Carré “ran” her as if she was his undercover agent. A Secret Heart, meanwhile, by the pseudonymous Suleika Dawson, is a soon-to-be-published memoir of an adulterous affair with le Carré, which began when the book’s author was in her early twenties and single, while the married spy writer had just turned 50. A Private Spy, the first collection of the late novelist’s letters, traces his path from boarding school boy to literary giant whose work has shaped our perception of the Cold War and beyond. This month sees the publication of not one but two books about the life of John le Carré.

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