Letícia Martins Da Cruz
DPhil Student
Research Topic: The Disillusioned Spy: British Identity Through an Intellectual History of John le Carré
Supervisor: Brian Young and Joshua Bennett
My doctoral research explores changing ideas of British identity through the writings and public thought of John le Carré. I am particularly interested in how his work engaged with Britain’s changing position in the world after empire, the Cold War, European integration, and the political transformations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Rather than treating le Carré’s novels simply as works of espionage fiction, I approach them as interventions in broader debates about Britain, its institutions, its international role, and the values through which British identity was understood and contested. His fiction repeatedly returns to questions of loyalty, duty, legitimacy, patriotism, decency, betrayal, and belonging. These concepts provide a particularly rich way of examining how ideas of Britain changed across more than half a century.
My research follows these themes across three broad periods of le Carré’s career. The first examines his Cold War writing from the 1960s to the end of the Cold War, including the novels associated with George Smiley and the British intelligence establishment. The second considers his work of the 1990s, when the disappearance of the Soviet adversary forced both his characters and Britain itself to confront a less certain international order. The third examines his twenty-first-century writing, in which questions surrounding the War on Terror, Anglo-American relations, Europe, Brexit, and the legacy of empire became increasingly prominent.
Methodologically, I situate le Carré within the history of political thought and intellectual history. I am interested not only in what he wrote, but in the political languages and conceptual vocabularies through which he interpreted contemporary Britain. My research therefore places his novels alongside essays, interviews, correspondence, autobiographical writings, archival material, and contemporary political debates.
A central part of the project will involve research in the John le Carré Archive at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. By examining drafts, correspondence, notebooks, and other archival materials alongside the published fiction, I hope to reconstruct how le Carré’s ideas about Britain developed and changed over time.
More broadly, my research asks what the work of one of Britain’s most influential post-war writers can reveal about the country’s changing understanding of itself. Through le Carré, I examine the tensions between Englishness and Britishness, imperial memory and post-imperial decline, national loyalty and moral responsibility, and the persistent question of what Britain believed itself to represent in the modern world.
Prizes and Funding
- Clarendon Fund Scholarship, University of Oxford — full funding for my DPhil in History, covering course fees and providing a living-cost stipend.
- CAPES Master's Scholarship, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF), 2023–2025 — postgraduate research funding awarded by the Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education (CAPES).
ProUni Full Scholarship — full undergraduate scholarship for my BA in History at the Universidade Católica de Petrópolis (UCP).
I am a proud Brazilian historian with a particular interest in memory, identity, and intellectual history. Much of my previous research has explored how individuals, families, institutions, and societies construct, preserve, and contest memories of the past, especially in relation to political change and historical trauma.
I am particularly drawn to archival research and to the ways in which personal testimony, literature, film, correspondence, and other cultural sources can reveal how people understand their own identities and their place within broader historical processes. Although my doctoral research now focuses on modern Britain, questions of memory, identity, political culture, and the relationship between individual experience and larger historical transformations remain at the centre of my work.
My Brazilian background is an important part of the perspective I bring to historical research, and I am especially interested in approaches that place different national and cultural experiences in conversation with one another.
Instagram: @leticiamartinscz
