Ben Macintyre Quotes

In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the 'inner ring', the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join.

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

This was an odd conclusion: seawater has many effects on the human body, but male-pattern baldness is not one of them.

'The Man Who Never Was,' by Ewen Montagu, remains the best book about wartime espionage written by an active participant - incomplete, and dry in parts, it nonetheless summons up the ingenuity and sheer eccentricity of those who played this strange and dangerous game.

The fatal conceit of most spies is to believe they are loved, in a relationship between equals, and not merely manipulated.

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.

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.

Libraries are not just for reading in, but for sociable thinking, exploring, exchanging ideas and falling in love. They were never silent. Technology will not change that, for even in the starchiest heyday of Victorian self-improvement, libraries were intended to be meeting places of the mind, recreational as well as educational.

Like all truly selfish people, Kliemann believed the minutiae of his life must be fascinating to all.

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.

What is the use of living if you cannot eat cheese and pickles?

As the real army plowed through the waves toward Normandy, two more fake convoys were scientifically simulated heading for the Seine and Boulogne by dropping from planes a blizzard of tinfoil, code-named "Window," which would show up on German radar as two huge flotillas approaching the French coast.

Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.

Britain's counterespionage officers saw signs of treachery in everything Ivor Montagu did: they saw it in his friends, his appearance, his opinions, and his behavior. But above all, they saw it in his passionate, and dubious, love of table tennis.

Well you stick the dynamite in the keyhole and you don't damage the safe, only sometimes you put a little too much in and blow the safe door up, but other times you're lucky and the safe just comes open.
Thus the scion of a great banking dynasty learned how to rob a bank.

As the Battle of Normandy raged, the Germans held fast to the illusion, so carefully planted and now so meticulously sustained, that a great American army under Patton was preparing to pounce and the German forces in the Pas de Calais must remain in place to repel it.

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.

Britain might be in the grip of rationing, but buying the materials for a homemade bomb was a piece of cake. (In fact, obtaining the ingredients for a decent cake would have been rather harder.)

The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy.

The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.

Eccentricity is one of those English traits that look like frailty but mask a concealed strength; individuality disguised as oddity.

The word most consistently used to describe Kim Philby was "charm", that intoxicating, beguiling and occasionally lethal English quality.

For the D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled. They included a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman, a Serbian seducer, and a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming.

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.

Sam Brewer enjoyed discussing Middle Eastern politics with Philby; Philby enjoyed sleeping with his wife.

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

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.

'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.

War is too messy to produce easy heroes and villains; there are always brave people on the wrong side, and evil men among the victors, and a mass of perfectly ordinary people struggling to survive and understand in between. Away from the battlefields, war forces individuals to make impossible choices in circumstances they did not create, and could never have expected. Most accommodate, some collaborate, and a very few find an internal compass they never knew they had, pointing to the right path.