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“... and calls for democratisation don’t amount to boldness, it is hard to know what would. Mark Frankland and Dusko Doder are journalists, British and American respectively, both of whom were in Moscow between Brezhnev’s death and Gorbachev’s accession to power. Otherwise their books have little in common. ...”

“... two years before the man who might have confirmed his faith in the Communist system came to power. Mark Frankland, the Observer’s Moscow correspondent, saw Maclean on 6 March 1983, five days before he died. As they parted, Frankland writes, ‘he walked me to the lift as an ambassador might show a guest out of his ...”

“... as comic plots tend to be, and wrought into a continuous narrative with no chapter divisions to mark the story’s progression as Miles, self-absorbed and lethally gullible, wanders through blending worlds of fact and fancy. There is a darkness in the tale, but the telling is always elegantly witty. (I shall treasure Mr White’s lapidary dismissal of ...”

“... on the evidence of Lewis’s perceptive and absorbing biography, that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre ...”