Ben Macintyre Quotes

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

Ben Macintyre

#2. 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.

Ben Macintyre

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

Ben Macintyre

#4. To disarm while being best armed, out of an elevation of sensibility-that is the means to real peace ...

Ben Macintyre

#5. '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.

Ben Macintyre

#6. 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.)

Ben Macintyre

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

Ben Macintyre

#8. 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.

Ben Macintyre

#9. 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.

Ben Macintyre

#10. 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.

Ben Macintyre

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

Ben Macintyre

#12. 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.

Ben Macintyre

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

Ben Macintyre

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

Ben Macintyre

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

Ben Macintyre

#16. 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.

Ben Macintyre

#17. 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.

Ben Macintyre

#18. 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.

Ben Macintyre

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

Ben Macintyre

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

Ben Macintyre

#21. The defining feature of this spy would be his falsity. He was a pure figment of imagination, a weapon in war far removed from the traditional battle of bombs and bullets.

Ben Macintyre

#22. 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.

Ben Macintyre

#23. '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.

Ben Macintyre