former head of British Intelligence, who physically resembled him. Le Carré denied the rumours, citing the fact that Oldfield and he were not contemporaries, although he and Alec Guinness did lunch with Oldfield while Guinness was researching the role, and Guinness adopted several of Oldfield's mannerisms of dress and behaviour for his performance. During the lunch, Oldfield denied to Guinness that he was the inspiration for Smiley, saying he was not like Smiley at all. In 1986, le Carré denied that Oldfield was the inspiration for Smiley, saying: "I never heard of Sir Maurice either by name or in any other way until long after the name and character of George Smiley were in print". Oldfield himself believed that, although Green probably inspired le Carré, the character of Smiley was primarily based on John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, who had been le Carré's boss when he originally joined MI5 prior to his career in MI6. In 1999, le Carré confirmed that Bingham was also an inspiration for Smiley, and in 2000 went further, writing in an introduction to a reissue of one of Bingham's novels that "He had been one of two men who had gone into the making of George Smiley. Nobody who knew John and the work he was doing could have missed the description of Smiley in my first novel". In an introductory essay dated March 1992, le Carré wrote: And it is no surprise to me that, when I came to invent my leading character, George Smiley, I should give him something of Vivian Green's unlikely wisdom, wrapped in academic learning, and something of Bingham's devious resourcefulness and simple patriotism also. All fictional characters are amalgams; all spring from much deeper wells than their apparent counterparts in life. All in the end, like the poor suspects in my files, are refitted and remoulded in the writer's imagination, until they are probably closer to his own nature than to anybody else's. But now that Bingham is dead ... it seems only right that I should acknowledge my debt to him: not merely as a component of George Smiley, but as the man who first put the spark to my writing career. Novels Call for the Dead (1961) A Murder of Quality (1962) The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) The Looking Glass War (1965) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) Smiley's People