I can recite you most of the Richard Hannay books from memory. I would never dream, despite a dash of self-loathing, of missing a James Bond film. My favourite television (as in the TV I secretly stay in for, rather than the box-set fests) is Spooks. (I was in seventh heaven in the final episode of the last season, when my favourite character, Connie – so much more interesting since she had been revealed as a Russian sleeper – offered to disarm a seeming nuclear warhead with a toolkit and a bottle of gin. Was she going to dunk the warhead in the gin and hope for the best? No, silly, she was going to swig manfully from the bottle while wielding a pair of pliers.) Gradually, you see, I've had to admit to myself that I like spy stories. Recently my friend Paul remarked, "Of course Connie in Spooks is a reference to Connie Sachs in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy." I hadn't realised that at all, but he set me hurtling down a dangerous path: a John Le Carré for Christmas later (from a brother who had arched an eyebrow at my request for what he called "genre fiction") and I am guiltily wolfing down George Smiley between bursts of the Costa awards shortlist (of which more in another post). I've suffered from the impatient hunger of the addict, too – the minute I finished Tinker, Tailor, I cycled crossly round Islington trying to find its sequel An Honourable Schoolboy, which, of course neither Borders nor Waterstone's actually had. (I bought it from Amazon marketplace in the end. How does that work – how do you make anything at all if you charge 9p for a paperback, which is what I spent on my pristine copy, plus postage of course?).

I'm not sure what this enthusiasm for spies is all about. It may be that it's just the attraction of the opposite – the idea of living a double life is beyond me and I'm a hopeless liar – but I suspect it's something rather deeper.

Do we find in spy stories a metaphor for the revelation of the true self, the gradual uncovering of a kind of authenticity? Or is it simply the magnetic pull of a brilliant story and a self-consistent world into which a reader can escape? Spy stories are as old as storytelling itself, so they clearly have some fundamental pull. The original spy is of course Odysseus – first of all in the rather unpleasant tale of his and Diomedes' night-time intelligence-gathering trip in Iliad book 10, when they capture and kill the Trojan Dolon after interrogating him. In the Odyssey, though, the entire epic hangs on the hero's secrecy, lying and his creation of effective "cover" (as a merchant, as a beggar, and so on) as he slowly negotiates his path back home to Ithaca and, crucially, finds a way to defeat the suitors who have been importuning his wife and occupying his palace. In flashbacks of various kinds, we also get the classic spy stories of the wooden horse, and a wartime foray of his into Troy disguised as an old woman. What can I say? George Smiley is but a footnote to Homer. But a very good one.