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“... Once upon a time, before the Channel Tunnel was built, there were two contemporary French novelists. Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of 45, and nobody in England who was not a French specialist had ever heard of him. With Philippe Sollers it was different. Editor of the avant-garde theoretical journal Tel Quel, and associate of literary and psycho-analytic thinkers such as Barthes, Kristeva and Lacan, his was a name of which no self-respecting British intellectual could afford to remain entirely ignorant – though his novels, so far as I can discover, were neither translated nor read ...”

“... and Poitras’s protectionism and they went to Hong Kong in a posse. Compared to any other major leak in recent times, the material passed on was not only of the highest order but beautifully organised. If there was a Zen prize for whistleblowers, Snowden would win without trying: he checks and labels everything, he thinks out the moral, he cross-references ...”

“... Smoke Ring: The Politics of Tobacco – ‘a marvellous book’. Later in the piece a ‘glorious leak’ undoes an attempt by the makers of Marlboro cigarettes to stop the world seeing film of the Marlboro cowboys dying of lung cancer. Marvellous, glorious, terrific, delightful: Paul enjoyed the books he wrote about. And when he didn’t like them he enjoyed ...”

“... outside ‘amateurs’ have to be recruited into the machine – and in the long term such people leak. Without doubt, the richness of the Andrew and Dilks collection owes much to such factors. Most of the essays are concerned with the 1900-45 period, and one learns of such fascinating byways as Japanese covert support for ...”

“... Pierce’s prudently pseudonymous novel ‘the bible of the racist right’, didn’t take long to leak the information that it accompanied Timothy McVeigh on his (alleged) bombing raid on 19 April 1995. Reference to The Turner Diaries was prominent in Rage and Betrayal, the highly prejudicial ABC programme of 12 April 1996, in which the newscaster Peter ...”

“... of reconciliation with his friends. Newspapers are ‘they’ and we, after all, are ‘we’. As Andrew Boyle relates, it turned out that a great many old acquaintances of Burgess and Maclean were much more horrified – felt, indeed, much more betrayed – by the fact that the late Goronwy Rees gave a version of their flight to the People than by the flight ...”

“... of the epidemic. A few days later, Patrick was joined in hospital by his nine-year-old brother, Andrew. Their older brother, Alexander, had felt the same headache and pricking in the fingers as their father but, like him, did not fall ill. Andrew seemed at first to be severely affected in his muscles, but eventually ...”

“... one who spent extended periods of time in his company could stand him: ‘a complete cunt’, as Andrew Strauss let slip in the commentary box this summer. That, incidentally, was a word that tended to attach itself to Rudd as well. Accused of describing Rudd in those terms, the former Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer replied: ‘I don’t use ...”

“... On one occasion, his boat started sinking: a naked Royal Society research professor repaired the leak in the course of several lengthy underwater explorations. Some of the most beguiling interstitial passages in Narrow Roads of Gene Land are accounts of life in the field. Hamilton was studying wasps in Brazil when his (ultimately) famous paper on altruism ...”

“... wants to know about – and if anybody does, too bad. As it happens, quite a bit of such data does leak through, and we are two or three times referred to page so-and-so of Stanley and the Women, or wherever, and he even lets fall the occasional bibliographer’s nugget, if you please: for instance, did you, or Private Eye, know that Amis’s very first piece ...”

“... that reforming the culture at Printing House Square was ‘like filling a pneumatic tyre with a leak in it’, and suggested that ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ should be inscribed over its portals. Nonetheless, ownership of the Times strengthened his campaign in 1911 to persuade the Tories, in opposition, to give up the food taxes which ...”

“... years till Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson acquired it in 1643. Then the news began, slowly, to leak out. The OED records ‘Viking’ as a word first used in 1807, and it had been well established by Longfellow, Bulwer-Lytton and others by mid-century. ‘Saga’ appeared a century earlier in Hickes’s pioneering Thesaurus of the Northern languages, but ...”

“... back to his seat. Under hot lights his hair dye dribbled as if his head had sprung an oil-can leak. He was nearly caught in a compromising position with a young actress pretending to be underage in the convoluted Borat Subsequent Moviefilm mockumentary. Then there was the shlock folly of the Four Seasons press conference held not at the regal Four Seasons ...”

“... States, still regarded in China as Enemy Number One, where two professors – Perry Link and Andrew Nathan – agreed to translate and edit the documents. Both men have been banned from China so, if this is a deliberate leak, they are an improbable choice. Perry Link, an expert on Chinese literature, was a close ...”

“... almost anywhere except China, the state can’t avoid elections, nor can any politician do what Andrew Mellon was reputed to have recommended in the 1930s – liquidate everything. We live, after all, in a democracy. To do nothing is politically impossible. To do something, however, requires a proper understanding of what went wrong. Here, much of the media ...”