‘Have you got over your father yet?’ the 26-year-old David Cornwell was asked by MI5’s head of personnel when he joined the agency in the spring of 1958. And the answer, more than half a century later, has to be ‘no’. We knew of his conman father Ronnie’s cartoonish presence in Cornwell’s life, but never the extent to which he has dominated his very being.
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £22 Tel: 08430 600033. Andrew Lycett is the biographer of Ian Fleming, Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle.
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