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“... encountered what he called the ‘social hierarchy’ in which Burgess and Blunt moved so easily. Andrew Sinclair helps to cut the moles down to size. The real intellectual élite in inter-war Cambridge, he reminds us, were not the moles or their contemporaries (mostly from the arts faculties) in the Apostles but the brilliant scientists at the Cavendish ...”

“... time to denounce publicly those journalists who had dared to print the name of the head of MI6, Christopher Curwen. The heads of the CIA and the KGB, William Casey and Victor Chebrikov, are of course public figures. But that, as Mr Ingham would say, is not the point. What the point is remains obscure. In 1932 the novelist Compton Mackenzie was tried for a ...”

“... became known as MI5 and MI6 had to be kept so secret; MI5 remained officially secret for 80 years. Christopher Andrew has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask ...”

“... Soviet institutions, was the perpetuator of many of the old views and practices. The conclusion of Andrew’s and Gordievsky’s lucid and detailed history – that sooner or later the KGB ‘will be disowned by its own citizens’ – provides a necessary benchmark which Soviet reform must reach if it is to be taken seriously, most of all by Russians. The KGB ...”

“... its old blanket denial and replacing it with a strategy of ‘information management’, as Christopher Moran termed it in his recent book, Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain.* Historians thought sympathetic to the intelligence services were granted privileged access to closed papers in order to produce official histories. One of them ...”

“... that Stonehouse was an agent lured by money. In his authorised history of MI5, published in 2009, Christopher Andrew concluded that Stonehouse had indeed spied for the Czechoslovaks, becoming ‘the only British politician (so far as is known) to have acted as a foreign agent while holding ministerial office’. Julian Hayes, Stonehouse’s great ...”

“... of this art being Guy Liddell. The development of this intelligence community is the theme of Christopher Andrew’s book, which contains the first reliable narrative history of the secret services from Victorian days to the present. Needless to say, he has received no encouragement from Whitehall, and former members of MI5 have been warned not to ...”

“... conspiracy theories. According to the defector Vasili Mitrokhin and the historian of intelligence Christopher Andrew, ‘by the late 1970s the KGB could fairly claim that far more Americans believed some version of its own conspiracy theory of the Kennedy assassination, involving a right-wing plot and the US intelligence community, than still accepted ...”

“... 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 Russian socialist revolutionaries against the Tsar, and the intelligence ...”

“... Secret Service: Sir Francis Walsingham ran it for Elizabeth I.) Today the hounds are in pursuit of Andrew Gow, the Classical scholar and art collector who was Blunt’s mentor at Trinity. Gow, who had taught at Eton, devoted part of his life to editing Nicander, a didactic Greek poet who wrote poems on snake-bites, poisons and their remedies – there is ...”

“... psychiatric controversy, and the MPD literature has furnished him with some wonderful material. Andrew Gage, his narrator, is one of many ‘souls’ inhabiting the body of Andy Gage, who was abused so severely by a cruel stepfather during childhood that florid multiplicity offered the only way out. Being, in his own opinion, fairly well-adjusted, ...”

“... Profumo, Lord Dilhorne, George Weidenfeld, Maurice Oldfield, Victor Rothschild, Lord Porchester, Andrew Parker Bowles: ideally they should be highlighted in bold type, as was the way in the Hickey column. The author lets us know a little about each. Mountbatten may have had an affair with Barbara Cartland; Prince Michael of Kent worked for British ...”

“... have started this book if I had known where it was going to end,’ she writes in the preface. Christopher Dickey wrote a memoir of the poet and novelist James Dickey, his father, in which he says the old man ‘killed my mother’. He also reports his father saying of the son: ‘I made his head.’ We might say of this kind of book that the making and ...”

“... language (British English, American English) and born at nearly the same time (1952, 1951). One, Andrew Motion, is quite well-known in this country, though an unfamiliar name to most readers of verse in America. The other, Nicholas Christopher, is one of the most celebrated of America’s younger poets but – I suspect ...”

“... 1966, when she was 19, the knicker-throwing debutante met a 27-year-old lieutenant in the Guards, Andrew Parker Bowles. He was handsome, and his parents were ‘excellent in-law material’. His father, Derek, a steward at Newbury racecourse, was a great friend of the Queen Mother’s, while his mother, Ann (nicknamed ‘Rhino’), was the Chief Commissioner ...”