Toby Manning completed his PhD from the English and Creative Writing Department, The Open University, in 2015. A book based on his PhD research has been published in January 2018, John le Carré and the Cold War, by Bloomsbury publishers. In an interview on the Spy Write forum, Toby discusses this and other publications by him on le Carré's work. He says: "Le Carré’s Cold-War books are totally suffused with the sense of a waning Britain, the submerged residue of imperialist chauvinism – a seething anti-Americanism on one hand, and a paranoid anti-Communism on the other. But these novels are also, I feel, constantly in dialogue with the political moment of their publication, once you track back and look at what was going on in Britain at that time."