“I look at you as an exquisite poet of self-hatred,” Errol Morris tells John le Carré in his new documentary about the writer, The Pigeon Tunnel. Morris elicited tears from former U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara. What will he coax from le Carré? Will he convince him to tell the truth about his work with M.I.6, work le Carré once denied, later deflected, and, at times, allegedly slyly inflated? That would make sense—the great spy novelist coming clean about his life as a spy and about the experiences that launched him into a life as a best-selling author—as that has always been the accepted line about le Carré. He was the spy who wrote what he knew, and was literature’s most astute observer of the emotional and moral costs of spy life; no one better understood the required elements of espionage during and after the Cold War, the complex architecture of a life built with lies. —Lea Carpenter