“... bipolar Kulturkampf, it did leak out to a wide public through the fictions of Len Deighton and John Le Carré. Watching the shadow-play on the walls of the Cold War cave, and seeing the literal interpenetration of opposites as Karla penetrated ‘us’, and ‘we’ reciprocated, one could make the induction that the spy ...”

“... counsel Vince Foster (who committed suicide in 1993) in order to cover up her transgressions. John Knox was surely right to label his 1558 diatribe against powerful women only The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, so well developed is the tradition of denigrating women thought to exercise influence from behind the ...”

“... Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur. Owen Matthews – whose new biography of Sorge is the fifth to appear in English – is well qualified to write this book: his Ukrainian maternal grandfather was Boris ...”

“... metaphysical, not homespun enough. Richard Hughes was one of our most effective local magicians; John Fowles has become one; William Golding has had the status a long time. His new novel confirms him as a master craftsman in his particular sort of magic. It is beautifully constructed, it grips the reader – so much so that its effectiveness gives it the ...”

“... his suffering at arm’s length. The problem with the new film, the TV series of 1979 and the le Carré novel of 1974, is that they have a situation but no plot: the secret is out, the enemy is within. The situation, essentially a version of the story of Kim Philby, is mesmerising. The Russians have a double agent high up in British intelligence, a top ...”

“... espionage worlds, and subsequently in business journalism. Unlike Fleming’s previous biographer John Pearson, Donald McCormick makes no attempt to psychologise his subject – or to reproduce the fluency which made Pearson’s book read as easily as a James Bond thriller. His justification is to produce, among much that is already familiar, some new ...”

“... the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. ‘The Circus’, it’s worth recalling, is what John Le Carré called his fictional spy headquarters.And then​ there was Peter Sichel, a German Jew from a family who had lost their wine business to the Nazis. He had escaped to Bordeaux and, after France fell, to the US via ...”

“... Highgate.’ He adapts the tone and texture of other ex-spooks who ‘went over’: Ian Fleming, John le Carré. He admits that his dialogue is invented, all his East End villains are squeezed into one composite character, Mickey Williams. MI6 became nervous of the Marks connection in the wake of the Littlejohn affair, two ...”

“... to the assessments that claimants had to undergo in order to receive disability benefits. As John Pring shows in The Department, these changes – and others that followed – would ‘lead to countless deaths of disabled people’.Many governments have talked up the number and significance of false claims. A decade before the Blenheim conference, Peter ...”

“... as winning the Cold War, or the ‘war on terror’. One of the things that’s so good about John le Carré’s Cold War thrillers is their moral murkiness, as they explore what happens when the people playing the game lose sight of its ultimate purpose, as they all inevitably do, and begin to play for the game’s own ...”

“... palette of thrillers and mysteries is often distinctly dark. From, say, Conan Doyle to, say, Le Carré, the genuineness of the gloom provides a note of authenticity, a convincing bass line, to underpin the various implausibilities of the main plot. Fleming is in that tradition. Everyone knows about his pioneering use of brand names as a way of making ...”

“... like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now ...”

“... faces and momentous events is a familiar move in Boyd’s fiction. In The New Confessions (1987), John James Todd, a Scottish filmmaker, fights in the trenches, is pauperised by the Wall Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of ...”

“... it’s been really easy to spot some Russians. But offline, it’s not like in the John le Carré books, when you see the handlers, and you really understand the mind games behind it and so on. We more or less know nothing. I feel like the Romanian state knows something, but we have a historical lack of ...”