One seasoned le Carré watcher believes that he encouraged the biography because he hoped to find out about himself, only to recoil in dismay when I held up the mirror.

He arranged assignations abroad, booked into hotels under assumed names, used a dedicated travel agent (a former intelligence colleague, or so he told one of his lovers), and listed women in his address book under code names. In a sense he was playing at being a spy. Several of the women in his life made that analogy, deciding that he was running them like agents. The reality was that he found the secrecy stimulating, introducing jeopardy and excitement into the humdrum routine of everyday existence. More than once he took a woman to the family home when Jane was away, even sharing the marital bed, though this meant risking exposure. Far from being a distraction, his clandestine affairs became important, perhaps even essential to his writing. And just as infidelity enlivened his real life, so betrayal became the underlying theme of his fiction, the one reflecting the other.

David worried that he had no real feelings, that he was incapable of love, that he was forever pretending. His fictional equivalents – Magnus Pym in A Perfect Spy or Ted Mundy in Absolute Friends, for example – are troubled by the sense that they don’t really know themselves. As I came to know him better, I came to appreciate that beneath the witty, urbane exterior lay a man surprisingly ill at ease.

Mosley later ascribed David’s reaction to being unable to cope with anything other than praise from a fellow writer. He remembered only when it was too late being warned that David was in the habit of seducing the wives of his close friends.

The meals were washed down with plenty of champagne, which he referred to as ‘shampoo’. (He used such old-fashioned slang with a kind of playful irony.)