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“... Contrary to the impression formed in some quarters, I do not know Clive Ponting well. Apart from a three-hour meeting in the presence of Brian Raymond, his remarkably gifted and industrious solicitor, in the early autumn of last year, I have never had a proper conversation with him. And that meeting related to the issue of whether I should lend my voluminous files and records of letters – some thirty-two boxes which would have taken up a large part of a pantechnicon – since he found himself in the position of having to defend himself without access to the Ministry of Defence records ...”

“... honesty in government, had been landed in the shit. It was at that moment that I heard the name of Clive Ponting for the first time. During 11 long days at the Old Bailey, luck was with us. Ponting’s solicitor, Brian Raymond, was resourceful. Merlyn Rees agreed to be a witness, and most effective he was. The jury was ...”

“... These two books have very different targets. Ponting assaults the entire political and administrative apparatus, retail and in gross, while Campbell and Connor go for the army of snoopers and data-gatherers. What they share is a thought which would have shocked a previous generation of political commentators – the thought that the British Civil Service is absolutely not to be trusted, that the ‘mandarin’ element provides next to no restraint on the politician’s standing inclination to mistake self-interest for the national interest, and that ‘confidentiality’ has become a cloak for a political and administrative unwillingness to answer to the wretched public ...”

“... Without Richard Norton-Taylor of the Guardian, there would be no Belgrano affair, and doubtless Mr Clive Ponting OBE would be plying his way, ever upwards, in the Ministry of Defence. This is no exaggeration. Simply a statement of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on ...”

“... dysentery or typhoid for every one who was killed in battle. Such is the familiar story and Clive Ponting tells it with verve and clarity. The Crimean War may lack the exuberance and wit of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why (1954), but instead it puts the war in its geopolitical context, reminding us not only that this was the largest and ...”

“... we continue to indulge in delusions of post-imperial grandeur, best summed up some years ago by Clive Ponting when he suggested that the real reason the navy needs an aircraft carrier is so that it has a large enough deck for the Royal Marines Band to beat the retreat at sunset in some tropical ...”

“... that ultimately the war would be won and the evils of Nazism destroyed for ever. Now for the Ponting version, in which there is more than a hint of autobiography. At an impressionable age, Ponting explains, he was captivated by Churchill’s war history. But later he began to discover discrepancies between ...”

“... Vetted juries returned acquittals in the ‘Anarchists’ (1979), Cyprus signalmen and Clive Ponting cases. Perhaps they were put on their mettle to show that they were not cat’s-paws of the Crown? We may take the point of expectations further than that. Because jury selection in England has been procedurally abbreviated, the dominant ...”

“... by the next freebooting blatherskite. But they are. Previous whistle-blowers like Ellsberg and Clive Ponting acted as lone individuals, opening cans of worms that had come to their notice while in official employ. WikiLeaks institutionalises such acts of individual conscience, as a kind of anti-Ministry of Truth. This will always go down like a rat ...”

“... of criminality – by which is meant a recasting of Section 2 to make sure that the next Clive Ponting does not escape. I do not know whether this stratification of style is found in other countries, but in Britain it has the peculiar advantage of corresponding to the stratification of social power and prestige and to the differentiation of ...”

“... which could only have come from inside a Department – as in the case of what came to me from Clive Ponting. A careful look at Michael Heseltine’s lengthy broadcast evidence shows what exactly was taking place in the Whitehall stratosphere during the month in which Hilda Murrell was murdered. On 6 March Denzil Davies wrote to the Prime ...”

“... as pragmatic still dominates the political map of Strathclyde. Breach of Promise, the title of Clive Ponting’s study of Wilson’s governments of the Sixties, evokes, with its suggestion of sordid betrayal, a polarity which dominates structures of feeling within the Labour Movement. The shades of men like Maclean and Maxton whose failure in politics ...”

“... Tisdall for sending a not especially sensitive document to the Guardian, and the persecution of Clive Ponting over the Belgrano, both left an unpleasant taste in many mouths, as the jury showed when they acquitted Ponting. The older, traditional Tories think Heseltine is too nouveau. At Oxford, he thought the ...”

“... enmeshed himself in the net that would choke him by agreeing to the hounding of Sarah Tisdall and Clive Ponting, and by not deploring Ingham’s remark, made to the Meeting of Information Officers (MIO) on the eve of Ponting’s trial at the Old Bailey, that the case should be heard by Judge Jeffreys. Nor had he ...”

“... not acting on ministerial instructions, but out of the same kind of anger at being abused that Clive Ponting displayed. To name them would be to put their careers in jeopardy. What I can say is that the source is at the very heart of Whitehall, is exceedingly unlikely to have fabricated such information and was in a position to know. It is simply not ...”