Le Carre donates literary archive to the Bodleian

The masterful Cold War spy novelist David Cornwell - pen name John le Carre - has donated his entire literary archive to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, where he studied languages at Lincoln College before becoming an Eton schoolmaster, an MI6 officer and eventually one of Britain's most successful writers.

"I am delighted to be able to do this," said Cornwell. "Oxford was Smiley's spiritual home, as it is mine."

'Smiley' of course is George Smiley, the intelligence officer at the heart of Cornwell's trilogy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, and famously brought to life by Alec Guinness in his portrayal for the BBC in the late 1970s.

Cornwell, now 79, has already sent 85 boxes of manuscripts and other material to the Bodleian, to be followed by private correspondence and photographs.

The Bodleian will display a lot of the material, including hand-written and typed drafts for several of his novels and private photographs of Cornwell and Guinness.

The novelist has always taken a keen interest in any filming of his work, and is currently overseeing the making a new feature film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by Tomas Alfredson, director of the admired Swedish vampire thriller Let The Right One In, and starring Gary Oldman as Smiley.

Guinness will always be a hard act to follow, but in a recent chat with The First Post, Cornwell made it clear he was delighted that Oldman was taking up the Smiley challenge.

Cornwell has been lauded for finding new plots for his thrillers since 1989 when the Berlin Wall came crashing down, smack in the middle of his literary territory. In his latest novel, Our Kind of Traitor, his old friends British Intelligence are tackling Russian mobsters. ·