Quotes from Ben Macintyre

All spies need to feel they are loved.

In a craven and hierarchical organization, the only thing more dangerous in revealing your own ignorance, is to draw attention to the stupidity of the boss.

William Gerbers" was a German-Swiss businessman living in Liverpool who had been conjured into being by Garbo before he even arrived in Britain.

Horsfall was fond of practical jokes. He once wired up a toilet seat to a battery and waited for a girlfriend to use it. 'The scream that Kath gave when the magneto was turned on was most satisfying,' he recalled. He even wrote a poem to commemorate the occasion. I gave her time to start her piddle Then gave the thing a violent twiddle Before I could complete a turn She closed the circuit with her stern, And shooting off the wooden seat Emitted a most piercing shriek.

Has the Prime Minister made up his mind to cover up at all costs the dubious third man activities of Mr Harold Philby who was first secretary at the Washington embassy a little time ago, and is he determined to stifle all discussions on the very great matters which were evaded in the White Paper, which is an insult to the intelligence of the country?

The logistics of the operation would have boggled most minds: the American contingent alone called for 6.6 million sets of rations, five thousand crated airplanes, five thousand carrier pigeons and accompanying pigeoneers, and a somewhat unambitious 144,000 condoms, fewer than two each.

Vivian was not alone in thinking that a man who spent so much time discussing table tennis was probably a spy.

This was a wonderfully surreal moment: the real Montagu addressing his fictional persona, in a work of filmic fiction, based on reality, which had originated in fiction.

Here was heroism, but here, too, was mounted suicide in full-dress costume.

When informed that a clerk at the Portuguese embassy was spying for both the Germans and the Italians, he wrote: "Why don't you shoot him?

MI5 was careful to destroy the traffic, aware of the potential repercussions if the inhabitants of southern London realized they were being sacrificed to protect the center of the city.

Jens was small with a long fair mustache. Winter was enormous, roughly the size of a large door. I called them Asterix and Obelix. We got on frightfully well.

And he began recruiting sluggish British carrier pigeons to be sent on this secret mission to infiltrate the German pigeon service and destroy it from within. Soon there was a force of 350 double-agent pigeons at his disposal, disguised as German pigeons, ready to do their bit.

What is the use of living if you cannot eat cheese and pickles?' she asked. As cofounder of the Cheese Eaters League, Ivor thought she had a point.

The KGB had long excelled in the dark art of manufacturing "fake news.

The greatest writers of spy fiction have, in almost every case, worked in intelligence before turning to writing. W. Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, John le Carré: all had experienced the world of espionage firsthand. For the task of the spy is not so very different from that of the novelist: to create an imaginary, credible world and then lure others into it by words and artifice.

On the other hand, his interest in table tennis was neither puzzling nor malign. He just liked table tennis. The hunt for the Table Tennis Ring was a vivid red herring.

He preferred women to men, and horses to both.

A farmer by birth, Purchase was 'rugged in appearance and character,' with 'an impish sense of humor' and a finely calibrated sense of the ridiculous: he loved Gilbert and Sullivan operas, toy trains, boiled eggs, and his model piggery in Ipswitch.

The KGB, however, was convinced that the entire Soviet embassy was the target of a gigantic and sustained eavesdropping campaign, and the fact that this snooping was invisible confirmed that the British must be very good at it.

After the Civil War, Worth drifted, like so many veterans, to New York City, which by the mid-1860s was already one of the most concentratedly criminal places on earth. The politicians were up for sale, the magistrates and the police were corrupt

These letters may have been the closest Hester Leggett ever came to romance: chattering pastiches of a young woman madly in love, and with little time for grammar.

only ever stole from those who had money to spare and remained adamant that crime need not involve thuggery: the Pinkertons found it astonishing that "throughout his career he never used a revolver or jeopardized the life of a victim.

The Elliott-Ustinov partnership proved extraordinarily effective but rather fattening: a fine chef, Klop tended to turn up unexpectedly, carrying rognons de veau à la liégeoise inside a leather top-hat case.