back to article John le Carré archives to rest at Bodleian Library

John le Carré has donated his literary archive to Oxford's Bodleian Library, delivering a crushing blow to archive-hungry American universities and a well-known East Anglian breeding ground for moles alike. Le Carré, or David Cornwell to use his real name, studied modern languages at Oxford before becoming a civil servant cum …

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  1. Jon Double Nice
    Go

    "Cornish Barn"

    new Reg SU unit please

    1. DrXym

      Conversion table

      Cornish barn = 3 double decker buses, .8 blue whales or .5 of an Oympic size swimming pool. Or put another way if you stacked his books up they would be equivalent to .3 Eiffel towers or approx 1/1200000 way to the moon.

      1. Hud Dunlap
        Joke

        But how many American Barns.

        Texas size of course.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      May I suggest ...

      The ISO Metric Barn, being 1.4142 x the capacity of a Dutch barn.

      The advantage of using the square root of 2 is that when the EU has a surplus of small barns, they'll always fit precisely into a standard barn.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    "a space the size of a Cornish barn"

    How much is that in terms of cubic linguine?

  3. Roger Ruffley
    Stop

    Unauthorized use of the term 'Cornish'?

    Isn't there a European directive that only Cornish pasties may be measured in terms of the Cornish Barn???!!!

    And is a Cornish barn bigger or smaller than a Welsh barn?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    IT Angle

    the size of a Cornish barn ... comprises multiple versions of his works

    So much wasted space. Writers need to learn to use revision control systems.

    I used CVS, Emacs and some Perl scripts running on Debian GNU/Linux for the novel I wrote. It wasn't a bestseller. However, I'm not blaming my tools for that.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Well ...

      I used a DECstation running WPS78 for the first book I wrote, and Amazon merchants have several Texas barns full of overs to sell.

      So there.

  5. Vincent Ballard
    Coat

    Oxford Ring

    There was a ring of moles recruited from Oxford too. It's just that they didn't have as much impact as the Cambridge one.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ahh, Stoppard

    Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, now where's my copy of that book.

    Ah, found it. Later folks, I'm going to take a break from my computers to re-read this one.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It was my great privilege...

    ...to meet Viv Green a couple of times in Oxford. He was an absolute legend, easily the most fascinating speaker I've ever heard. And he used to ping about the place on his motorbike well into his nineties. Good times.

  8. Cliff

    And back on topic for a moment...

    This is superb news. John Le Carré is without question one of the most rounded and important writers working in the world today. What he does well is to combine rip-roaring adventure stories with great character studies.

    Lots of people write in the genre, but most gloss over peoples motivations. JLC's work and strength is a deep understanding of motivation (and not assuming it is James Bond/for king and country stuff - it is always VERY ambiguous and murky). And the fact it'll work its way online eventually is hugely exciting!

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    His best novel?

    A Small Town in Germany.

    A difficult choice from such a brilliant body of work. Like the greatest writers, LeCarre digs right down to the soul. The last words:

    "Check his pockets."

  10. Lghost
    Headmaster

    sub eds eyes wonky? or an alias ?

    In 1995, he confirmed his Lincoln College tutor the Rev Vivian Green was the inspiration for his most famous creation, George Smiely.

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