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“... At the beginning of this puzzling book the author, Bernard Wasserstein, Professor of History and Chairman of the History Department at Brandeis University, offers his excuses for writing it. It is, he says, the story of a man who left barely any footprints in political history and whose literary relics are without enduring value. As a further turn-off Professor Wasserstein confesses that his colleagues are unlikely to regard the life of Trebitsch Lincoln as a significant contribution to the advancement of historical understanding ...”

“... it. ‘What does that leave us?’ I asked him. He looked gloomy and after a moment replied: ‘Phillip, our ship is on the rocks.’ And that was that. (Although I hear that Modin is writing his own book on his experiences as an agent-runner.) Costello and Tsarev went ahead and this book is the result. As the authors warn early on, no new living spies are ...”

“... In the summer of 1975 I was invited by a man I knew had contacts in MI5 to have lunch at the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge. He wanted me to meet ‘someone from the office’ who had a story which might interest the Sunday Times, where I was then working. There was another guest, an aristocratic young man from the City whose role appeared to be that of prompting the MI5 officer – for that is what I took the man from ‘the office’ to be – when he hesitated over a real or pretended indiscretion ...”

“... In the international intelligence community, (a loose term to cover spies, spy writers and spy groupies) there are two views on Kim Philby. One is that after he fled to Moscow he was a burnt-out case, a pathetic drunk living on the memory of his great triumph – fooling the West for thirty years. In this scenario, Philby drank to drown the thought of what might have been ...”

“... Gorbachev and one with Philby, every one of us would have picked the latter. In the event, it was Phillip Knightley who landed the fish, but only after twenty years of patient casting. When news came on the World Service on Sunday morning last March that the Sunday Times had started a serialisation of his week of interviews with the old spy, my reaction ...”

“... deeply unsavoury, crushingly expensive and, in the final analysis, embarrassingly ineffective. Phillip Knightley, whose books include The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the 20th Century, has persuasively argued that ‘most intelligence is useless . . . Most political leaders know this but ignore it because they find intelligence a ...”

“... year and expressed their indignation. But there was a lot that Kennedy and others didn’t know. Phillip Knightley, who wrote an excellent book about war reporting, The First Casualty, records his reluctance to drag up ‘Profumo’ until he saw the material his colleague, Caroline Kennedy, had acquired while working for a Zenith Productions film. It ...”

“... here. The others are embedded with US Forces and subject to the restrictions that implies. (Phillip Knightley should now prepare a new edition of The First Casualty. We’re going to need it.) The journalists and the American Army are not the only runners racing to the Baghdad finishing line. Other contestants are Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National ...”

“... of the few people of any wit, seriousness or integrity to have done well out of this business is Phillip Knightley, and look what we find on page 190 of his book, produced with Genrikh Borovik. Kim Philby is apparently talking:But if success does come, an agent has the obligation to take full advantage of it, even better, to take double advantage of ...”

“... in October 1966 might have been organised by the KGB. However, in the less than kindly judgment of Phillip Knightley, a sensible dabbler in such subjects, ‘an Irish criminal came forward and described how he and Blake had arranged the escape themselves.’ Now this has been overtaken by new testimony. The Pottle and Randle version at least rounds off ...”

“... the original ‘C.’, thought espionage ‘a capital sport’, and is memorably described by Phillip Knightley in his recently reissued study of 20th-century spying, The Second Oldest Profession:* He wore a gold-rimmed monocle, wrote only in green ink, and, after he lost his leg in an accident, used to get around the corridors by putting his wooden ...”

“... he devotes only three and a half pages to them and Eleanor Brewer is not mentioned once. Phillip Knightley, the only journalist to have interviewed Philby after his defection, believes that he spent his first couple of years there just biding his time. ‘His problem was that his Moscow masters could not use him again until the British ...”