How John le Carré ran his many mistresses like spies - with code names, dead drops and safe houses: Only now, after the great writer's death, can his biographer reveal the true scale of his philanderi

The marriage of spy novelist David Cornwell - better known to the world by his pen name, John le Carré - to his second wife Jane was often characterised in public as an ideal partnership. Cornwell's marriage to his second wife Jane was often characterised in public as an ideal partnership He claimed that these extra-marital relationships were 'impulsive, driven, short-lived affairs, often meaningless in themselves', but while that might be true of some of them, others appear to have been much more serious and long-lasting But he told me: 'I don't care what you write about me after I'm dead.' After a first marriage, to Alison, littered with infidelities, including with Susie Kennaway, the wife of his best friend, fellow writer James Kennaway, David met publishing assistant Jane Eustace. Even while Jane was pregnant with their son Nick, he was having an affair - with a woman who went by the name of Liese Deniz, though she had been born Norma Dennis in Sheffield, the daughter of a long-distance lorry driver She was living in a small house in Kentish Town, North London, when she began the affair with David.