John le Carre’s intellectual hero George Smiley has come to be seen as the perfect spy. Le Carre has revealed that the model for Smiley was the author and MI5 officer John Bingham, the 7th Baron Clanmorris. Michael Jago’s brilliant account of Bingham’s life is not just the story of a perfect spy, it is also of a writer whose thrillers transcended the genre, exploring the emotions behind the darkest human behaviour. As an intelligence officer the bespectacled Bingham had a deep influence on Le Carre, then a junior colleague in MI5. Like Smiley, Bingham was an expert interrogator. His understanding of the human psyche, demonstrated so brilliantly in his seventeen novels, persuaded his subjects to give up the intelligence they were holding deep inside.