Quotes from Ben Macintyre

'What if?' history is a tricky game, but there is no doubt that the senior planners of D-Day - including Eisenhower and the British general Bernard Montgomery - believed that the Double Cross operation had played a pivotal role in the victory.

Quisling, vague, inefficient, and fanatical, won the rare distinction of being so closely associated with a single characteristic—treachery—that a noun was created in his name. At

And so, as the bombs fell around him, this heroic British undertaker sat in his own grave, wearing his swimming trunks and a helmet, drinking a nice up of tea.

In this, they echoed the views of a generation brought up to think of Britain as Great, but now doomed in peacetime to watch the American ascendancy, decolonisation, queues, bureaucracy, socialism and other perceived indignities as the Empire declined.

The decision to leave his family behind was either an act of monumental self-sacrifice, or one of selfish self-preservation, or both. He told himself he had no choice, which is what we all tell ourselves when forced to make a terrible choice.

Elliott and Philby existed within the inner circle of Britain's ruling class, where mutual trust was so absolute and unquestioned that there was no need for elaborate security precautions. They were all part of the same family.

Clearly, their application had been rejected, or merely ignored, on the longstanding principle that anyone who applies to join an espionage service should be rejected.

wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

At the age of nineteen, Gordievsky took up cross-country running. Something about the solitary nature of the sport appealed to him, the rhythm of intense exertion over a long period, in private competition with himself, testing his own limits.

He was a man who regarded his opinions, however briefly adopted, as revealed truth: he never backed down, or listened, or compromised. He was equally swift to give and take offense and ferociously critical of everyone except himself.

The myth of Aryan dominance, initially an attempt to trace the lost language of the Aryas, began as a set of undemonstrable racial assumptions, and ended in a colossal, perfectly unscientific lie: "I decide who is Jewish and who is Aryan," announced Goebbels. That is what the Nazis meant by natural selection.

Out of a hundred birds of the same stock perhaps one will be that bird all breeders hope for—a bird of highly individual character, courageous and resourceful. Much depends on the individual bird and especially its character and intelligence.

Nietzsche called the ear "the organ of fear," and believed that the sense of hearing "could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life in the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has been: in bright daylight the ear is less necessary. That is how music acquired the character of an art of night and twilight.

Constructed almost entirely of wood, with a two-man crew and no defensive guns, the little plane could carry four thousand pounds of bombs to Berlin. With two Rolls-Royce Merlin engines and a top speed of four hundred miles per hour, it could usually outrun enemy fighters. The Mosquito, nicknamed "the Wooden Wonder," could be assembled, cheaply, by cabinetmakers and carpenters.

Before becoming headmaster of Eton, Claude Elliott had taught history at Cambridge University, despite an ingrained distrust of academics and an aversion to intellectual conversation. But the long university vacations gave him plenty of time for mountain climbing.

It was beginning to dawn on me that most of the history of Paraguay revolved around white men chasing after other white men in the jungle, or else trying to turn the brown ones white.

Soviet intelligence was playing a long game, laying down seed corn that could be harvested many years hence or left dormant forever. It was a simple, brilliant, durable strategy of the sort that only a state committed to permanent world revolution could have initiated. It would prove staggeringly successful.

And so began a bizarre situation in which Philby told Moscow the truth and was disbelieved because the truth contradicted Moscow's expectations.

The Double Cross system was now not only self-financing but profitable, to Masterman's delight: "The actual cash supplied by the Germans to maintain their and our system between 1940 and 1945 was something in the region of £85,000"—the equivalent of more than £4.5 million today.

The mystery of Hitler's monkeys remains unsolved.

For an intelligence service, there is no process more painful and debilitating than an internal hunt for an unidentified traitor. The damage Philby did to MI6's self-confidence was far greater and more enduring than anything he inflicted by spying for the KGB. A mole does not just foment mistrust. Like a heretic, he undermines the coherence of faith itself.

Colonel Vivian had convinced himself that Ivor Montagu's enthusiasm for Ping-Pong was a cover for something more sinister.

To disarm while being best armed, out of an elevation of sensibility—that is the means to real peace.…

The Beirut beat was a demanding one. Middle Eastern politics were as complex and volatile in 1956 as they are today. But as Philby knew from his years as a correspondent in civil-war Spain, there is no better cover job for a spy than that of journalist, a profession that enables the asking of direct, unsubtle, and impertinent questions about the most sensitive subjects without arousing suspicion.