Perry Makepiece and Gail Perkins, an innocent couple dragged into the world of crime and the security services in Our Kind of Traitor, Le Carré's 22nd novel, are two such figures.
Epitomizing a certain kind of class, Le Bernardin amounts to the restaurant equivalent of old money, so secure in its station that it need not strut, so practiced in its posture that it never slouches.
When a far-right politician in eastern Europe wants to make the kind of transition Le Pen has made for the FN – from squadism to Chanel suits – it does not have to travel so far.
Imagine if the kind of intelligence Le Corbusier applied to the Unité d'Habitation in the late 1940s housing scheme in Marseilles, another great and often run-down maritime city, could be resurrected in contemporary form in Liverpool.
In his new book, "Our Kind of Traitor," le Carré may not bring back the old-school secret agent, but he'll certainly warm the hearts of those of us who long for the era before Jack Bauer, when spies quoted P. G. Wodehouse and wore mackintoshes.
Long before any teenagers started twitching, the conversation at the coffee shop in town or at the counter of Jim DuPont's television-repair shop would turn, from time to time, to speculation about what kind of waste Le Roy's manufacturing plants might have left behind.
"Our Kind of Traitor," John le Carré's bullet train of a new thriller, is part vintage John le Carré and part Alfred Hitchcock.
"Britons love this kind of story," John le Carre said here in 1976.
The organisation that produces the index, the Fund for Peace, is the kind of outfit John le Carré thinks we should all be having nightmares about.
"There seemed to be a kind of après Rennie, le déluge sense, which I think is giving me too much credit for the terrific value Scientific American has always had," he said.
