EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

“He was, by the time he died, an Irish citizen,” Nicholas Cornwell, who writes as Nick Harkaway, says in a BBC Radio 4 documentary due to air on Saturday. “On his last birthday I gave him an Irish flag, and so one of the last photographs I have of him is him sitting wrapped in an Irish flag, grinning his head off.”

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Britain’s vote to leave the EU compounded his disenchantment with Britain, he told the Irish writer John Banville in 2019. “I think Brexit is totally irrational, that it’s evidence of dismal statesmanship on our part, and lousy diplomatic performances. I think my own ties to England were hugely loosened over the last few years. And it’s a kind of liberation, if a sad kind.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/01/john-le-carre-chronicler-of-englishness-died-irish-son-reveals