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“... calendar. Smiley must be close on eighty rather than (as we are yet again told) ‘middle-aged’. Alec Guinness (to whom The Secret Pilgrim is dedicated) was 68 when he played in the TV adaptation of Smiley’s People, and looked it. But he projected a Teiresian sense of being somehow beyond age, which worked very well and seems true to le Carré’s ...”

“... these things. 21 April. A lunch party at the Connaught for John Gielgud’s 90th birthday given by Alec Guinness. John G. in an olive-green corduroy suit, elbows pressed firmly into his sides, hands clasped over his tummy, smiling and giggling and bubbling over with things to say and (except for a small fading of the voice) no different from when I first ...”

“... a cello, an ‘unbridled oboe’, or, most spectacularly, ‘a trumpet muffled with silk’ (Alec Guinness), had not been recognised by a person who was in court on some other, unrelated business. If all this indeed happened at the height of a homophobic witch-hunt, the actor seems to have got off easily with a small fine and a routine scolding. It ...”

“... Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and left. Alan’s languid phone calls were often to do with professional humiliation. In the 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his ...”

“... perfunctory dismissal of Sellers in Stage People, where we were told that to compare Sellers with Alec Guinness was ‘to notice the difference between acting and mimicry’: ‘Sellers entirely lacked grace and gravitas; he was a brattish, unintelligent performer, happy only when dodging into coarse goonery.’ It seems clear enough from this that ...”

“... the show because Lionel Blair was indisposed; Yehudi Menuhin was told to turn up with his banjo; Alec Guinness was mistaken for ‘Mr Wise’s’ taxi-driver; the exotic and much fêted André Previn was plain ‘Mr Preview’ – the name by which, he told McCann, he is still known to many London cab-drivers more than twenty-five years after appearing ...”

“... I have a shameful taste for military bands and films about army life, like Tunes of Glory, with Alec Guinness and John Mills. An intense dislike of denim, which I associate with fatigues and servility, has deterred me from ever wearing jeans. I love to hear a Jamaican accent and, despite its violence and gang warfare, I still think of the island’s ...”

“... adaptation, which has been on Apple TV+ since last year (two books down, six and counting to go). Alec Guinness inhabited the role of Smiley so completely in the 1970s BBC version of Tinker Tailor and its sequel that it’s always slightly surprising (to me, anyway) when le Carré’s novels describe him as short, fat and balding. Oldman’s too smart an ...”

“... instability of identity, it may simply be that as cultural actors Athenians were much more Alec Guinness than Method school. If actors seem to have been peculiarly uncompromised by the lines they spoke, the same was not true of the poets who wrote them. A famous passage in Aristophanes shows the poet Agathon becoming womanish in order to write a ...”

“... when I imagine the physical appearance of Adolf Hitler is not what I imagine when I imagine Alec Guinness made up to look just like Hitler, though the visualised content may be as similar as you like. To a first approximation, the difference is made by the conditions under which a proposition representing the imagined content would be true (or ...”

“... Home, a Home, a Home.’ Brought up to believe that there’s no place like it, no race like it, Alec would hardly have let the family down, amid the hubbub of a leadership contest which turned the coroneted head of another contender, the once and future Lord Hailsham, by unmasking him as nothing more than a professional politician out of the chorus line in ...”

“... establishment at play’. If you sit up late enough watching DVDs of the BBC adaptation starring Alec Guinness, or Martin Ritt’s version of The Spy who Came in from the Cold with Richard Burton, it’s possible to persuade yourself that le Carré might even be the greatest English novelist alive. Unfortunately, looking at his other books the next ...”

“... get John le Carré the public author: his successes, his reviews, his celebrity friendships (with Alec Guinness and Stephen Fry), his celebrity spats (with Salman Rushdie). There is little about his son from his second marriage, Nicholas (who writes as Nick Harkaway), and practically nothing about his relationships with his three sons from the first ...”

“... the only time I met him, in 1977. I had a play running in the West End, The Old Country, with Alec Guinness. Wordy I think it now and thin on plot, it was an account of a Foreign Office defector, now living in Soviet Russia, who is being tempted home, possibly to face the music. It had good reviews, though journalists, and even some ...”

“... the National I am ‘young man’, which reminds me that the doorman of Durrants Hotel once called Alec Guinness ‘young man’ thereby forfeiting his tip – though he might have expected to have it doubled. Our fair-haired bin man always bellows ‘ALAN’ above the noise of the rotor. ‘Still on your bike?’ I am grateful to be so generally greeted ...”