“I seem to have written two versions of myself into it — or better, two ages,” le Carré writes in an introduction to a special Waterstones edition of A Delicate Truth. “In Toby Bell, thirtysomething rising star of Her Majesty’s Foreign Service, I see the striving ambitious fellow I fancy myself to have been at much the same age, until I went and messed everything up by writing The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.”