72 Quotes by Ben MacIntyre

He preferred women to men, and horses to both.

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.

The mystery of Hitler’s monkeys remains unsolved.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.