Hugo Rifkind in the Times – Le Carré never forgot which side he was on: "The bestselling author loved to skewer craven establishment figures but always remembered who the good guys were."
Like when he refused to back Salman Rushdie over the Satanic Verses affair, perhaps, saying that "nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity"? Was Ayatollah Khomeini, then, one of the good guys?
I'd have thought the Rushdie affair provided a very clear test of where people stood on the issue of free speech and who the good guys were….a test which Le Carré notably failed at the time.
Here's the exchange of letters in the Guardian between Rushdie, Le Carré, and Christopher Hitchens.
They all made up later.
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