Quotes from Ben Macintyre

Martin Luther had written "Know, Christian, that next to the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous and violent than a true Jew

Operation Claret proceeded with the sort of smoothness that suggested no one in authority was paying adequate attention.

In a word, adventure to Chapman is the breath of life. Given adventure he has the courage to achieve the unbelievable.

Richard Brooman-White, Elliott's chum who had eased Philby into Section V, came to stay in 1946 and was very nearly immolated when a waitress in Elliott's favorite restaurant attempted to flambé an omelet at the table by pouring brandy onto a heated pan, causing a violent explosion that set fire to the hair of a Swedish diner. Elliott extinguished her with three glasses of white wine. Philby made a point of stopping off in Switzerland during his

Survival, to judge from the racks of guns, knives, gougers, stabbers and garrotters on display, tends to involve homicide.

Actually the only one of us who has been to Paraguay in the last thirty years is the Ambassador," said the receptionist, "and he's in Wales at the moment.

Far from being repelled by the duplicity around him, Elliott felt ever more drawn to the game of skulduggery and double cross. The Venlo debacle had been "as disastrous as it was shameful," but he also found it fascinating, an object lesson in how highly intelligent people could be duped if persuaded to believe what they most wanted to believe. He was learning quickly.

Fleming is charming65 to be with, but would sell his own grandmother. I like him a lot.

He urged freedom above all, and self-realization, and spurned "the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats.

true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

In war, no variable is more important, and less easy to control, than the element of surprise.

John Masterman once wrote: "Sometimes in life27 you feel that there is something which you must do, and in which you must trust your own judgment and not that of any other person. Some call it conscience and some plain obstinacy. Well, you can take your choice.

If you put into one room everyone who considered themselves a Nietzschean, there would be a bloodbath.

It did his career no longterm damage, but Dudley Clarke's strange episode of cross-dressing remains an enduring mystery.

Allied casualty rates averaged 6,674 a day for the seventy-seven days of the Normandy campaign. Those numbers would have been far higher, had it not been for a small and most peculiar band of men and women fighting a secret battle.

Some 480 suspected enemy spies were detained in Britain in the course of the war. Just 77 of these were German. The rest were, in descending order of magnitude, Belgian, French, Norwegian, and Dutch, and then just about every conceivable race and nationality, including several who were stateless. After 1940, very few were British. Of the total intercepted, around a quarter were subsequently used as double agents, of whom perhaps 40 made a significant contribution.

The relationship between cricket (that most English of sports) and spying (at which the British have always excelled) is deep-rooted and unique. Something about the game attracts the sort of mind also drawn to the secret worlds of intelligence and counter-intelligence – a complex test of brain and brawn, a game of honour interwoven with trickery, played with ruthless good manners and dependent on minute gradations of physics and psychology, with tea breaks.

Major Müntzinger's boast that Germany had "many agents in England" was entirely correct. But so far from being "excellent," most of them were hopeless, many were actively disloyal, and a number were already working against Germany as double agents.

She was passionate, prejudiced, charismatic, narcissistic, reckless, volatile, lovable, hypercritical, emotionally fragile, and uncompromising.

British intelligence was not above "bumping off" enemy spies, to use the cheery euphemism favored by MI6.

One night, as they walked home from a concert, Rudi paused under a streetlamp. "He stood against the light. His thick hair was still unruly in the same surprising way, his dark eyes never lost their melancholy and veiled expression, even when he laughed or was deep in thought." That was the moment she fell in love. "Can a second, a sentence, the expression in the eyes of a person suddenly change everything previously felt into something new?" she wondered.

Love often begins with an outpouring of naked truth, a passionate baring of the soul.

Praetorius was delighted with his new appointment, although his new position was not one normally associated with the fearsome Nazi war machine, let alone the Teutonic heroes of old. Praetorius had long been convinced of the therapeutic physical and cultural effects of English folk dancing. Somehow he had persuaded the German authorities of this and was duly appointed dance instructor to the Wehrmacht.

CAPTAIN RAMIREZ: "Ootunondumi rabo Caaguazu." FRANCISCO: "Bokinmaginum sinking." RAMIREZ: "Help.