72 Quotes by Ben MacIntyre

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.

One does not look twice at an offer of enrollment in an elite force.

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

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

'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.

'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.

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.

I love telling stories, and am almost entirely unable to keep a secret.

I think I would have been a hopeless spy. I love telling stories and am almost entirely unable to keep a secret.