Peter Guillam, a long-retired British spy living in quiet retirement in Brittany, receives a letter from his former employers, asking him to return to London to account for his part in a murky operation in Berlin in the early 1960s.  And so begins what seems to be Le Carré’s final visit to The Circus.

There’s plenty of the traditional “trade craft” here to delight fans of espionage novels, as well as bags of Cold War atmosphere, but this is a world away from the silliness of James Bond and Jason Bourne.  This is deeply serious stuff;  about growing old, about deceptions, disloyalty, and coming to terms with the past.

A Legacy of Spies feels like a long and final note of farewell.  It’s extraordinary to think that nearly fifty years have passed since Le Carré’s debut novel and the start of a writing career in which he has amassed millions of devoted followers and countless accolades.  If this proves to be the last we hear from The Circus, there’s at least some solace seeing an author bowing out with his powers undiminished and in complete control of a genre that he mastered a long time ago.

I made my second visit to Petra last week.  It’s one of the world’s unique places, a monument of incomparable beauty and grandeur. Like many popular historical sites, it attracts every year a huge number of tourists who contribute much-needed money to the fragile local economy. But mass tourism isn’t an entirely innocent or trouble-free phenomenon, an uncomplicated boon for visitors and locals alike.  Government agencies are becoming more and more aware of the environmental damage tourists do in places such as the Galapagos Islands, Iceland, and the Great Barrier Reef, and are taking steps to do something that would have been inconceivable a few years ago: discourage tourism.

The pernicious effects of tourism go beyond the environmental impact on fragile places.  In Petra last week, there were scores of children skipping school to sell worthless trinkets to visitors.  I saw a man kicking, viciously and repeatedly, one of the horses that take tourists around the monument.  These weren’t isolated incidents.  Signs around the site indicate the Jordanian government’s awareness of such abuses.

What’s the proper response to such things?  Stay at home, denying oneself the experience and the local economy the money it needs?  Complain to local authorities?  Refuse to use abusive services and find less harmful ways to contribute to local development?  None of this is easy.  A starting point is to be thoughtful and to recognize that each of us is part of a growing problem: the ugly underbelly of tourism.

Very few of the millions who visit Agra every year to see the Taj Mahal make the short journey across the Yamuna river to visit I’timad-ud-Daulah.  It was an article by Simon Schama in the Financial Times that alerted me to the tomb commissioned by Nur Jahan and built in the 1620s to house the remains of her father, Mirza Ghiyas Beg.  I had missed it on four previous visits to Agra, but it was top of my “must see” list when I returned there recently.  It’s a little bit of a stretch to call it “forgotten”, as Schama does, but I had to myself on the morning I visited.

The locals refer to it as Baby Taj.  It’s easy enough to see why but the comparison is slightly insulting because it diminishes a monument that in some respects surpasses its much more famous neighbor.  While the building’s exterior is gorgeous, decorated with onyx, jasper and topaz, it’s when you step inside that you’re likely to be thunderstruck. The richly painted ceilings and walls, covered in plants and flowers, are a riot of color, and make the interior of the Taj itself seem restrained and monochrome.  Next time you’re in Agra, ask your tuk-tuk driver to head to I’timad-ud-Daulah, and take an hour to pay homage to the artists and craftsmen of seventeenth century India who created what is truly one of the wonders of the cultural world.

A novel occasionally comes along that attracts hordes of readers to a genre that they normally wouldn’t consider.  The Fifty Shades trilogy did it for erotica and Gone Girl gave a similarly positive lift to sales of mysteries.  The Perfect Nanny, published as Chanson Douce in France and as Lullaby in other English-speaking markets, looks like it might have the same impact on … what?  The domestic thriller or readable literary fiction genres?  Leila Slimani’s novel is a difficult one to classify, but one thing’s for certain.  Having won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in France, it’s far better written than anything E.L. James or Gillian Flynn are ever likely to produce.

At first sight the setting might appear gruesome and schlocky.  An apparently perfect nanny, a godsend to two busy working parents, murders the small children in her care.  But the plot, sensitively handled and never titillating, is a vehicle for some profoundly serious issues: race, class, parenthood and domesticity.  It’s an unsettling book because it reminds us of the casualties and consequences of the “wanting it all” mindset and the profoundly unequal societies we are busy creating.

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of my first visit to Delhi.  I have returned many times in those forty years and it remains one of my favorite cities.  I recently had the opportunity to spend a few days there with someone seeing it for the first time.  I enjoyed being a tour guide, accompanying her to Humayun’s Tomb, Gandhi Smriti, and the Lotus Temple.  February can be a lovely month in Delhi, with cool, clear days and that extraordinary light, and we were blessed with brilliant blue skies.

Delhi has been transformed since my first visit and although I find it easy to remember the city of those days and the wonder-struck teenager I was, I have no nostalgia for the dirty and crumbling Delhi of the late 1970s.  It’s a cleaner, less chaotic city for sure, but seeing it through someone else’s eyes made me realize it’s lost none of its power to amaze.

First-time visitors to India tend to arrive in the country laden with misconceptions, half-truths, and distortions.  This is what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes as “the danger of a single story” in her wonderful TED Talk.  Those who love India and its people, those who are drawn back again and again – and I’m certainly one of them – know it’s a place of a billion stories.  Some of them are mine.