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“... pleased to call closed.’ Peter Wright’s Spycatcher (1987) got the same kind of treatment; even Stella Rimington rubbishes it. Nobody loved him, whether they accepted his charges – a Russian mole in MI5, the ‘Wilson plot’ – or not. This is understandable. Ministers (like Churchill) resent the betrayal of trust; outsiders are bound to be ...”

“... the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights, the pressure group Liberty all agree – even Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, has reportedly condemned the restriction as ‘ridiculous’. Practically every other country that has considered the issue has decided to make the material available in court if needed; nowhere is there any question ...”

“... Roger Windsor’s has been ‘linked’, to use the coy formulation of Fleet Street, is that of Stella Rimington. Now resold to us all as the user-friendly face of a newly-feminised secret police, Ms Rimington’s career at MI5 has in fact been rather more hatchet-visaged than her handlers pretend. The MI5 defector ...”

“... only as long as the Empire did. The last director general with even post-colonial experience was Stella Rimington, who was talent-spotted in (independent) India, where her husband worked at the British High Commission. When this source dried up it caused recruitment problems. While it still operated, however, its bearing on the values of the service is ...”

“... known generally as MI5, continued to expand even after the end of the Cold War, and by 1992, when Stella Rimington took over, it had more than 2300 staff. The volume of material circulated by GCHQ, the signals intelligence agency, and by SIS, the overseas intelligence service, also ensures them a significant place in government. In 1995, John Major ...”

“... Chronicle included in the same sentence. 8 November. Listen to The Archive Hour on Radio 4, with Stella Rimington the ex-head of MI5 taking us through the material the BBC holds on the Cambridge spies, particularly the so-called fifth (or is it sixth) man, John Cairncross. It’s all pretty factual, with ...”

“... get American support. This is not what you might have expected from the reactionary buffers that Stella Rimington, the future MI5 director-general, depicts in her memoirs as working there (mostly lunching and drinking) when she joined the agency in the 1970s. Perhaps they really were masters of disguise. Or, more likely, they were just saying what the ...”

“... one, the history of female espionage – from Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Van Lew to Lotus Blossom to Stella Rimington – is slowly being filled out. Proctor believes, however, that female intelligence work is even now generally regarded as ‘exceptional, rare and surprising’ – in popular representations of espionage, the stereotypes have never gone ...”

“... brought him respect where it mattered. Norton-Taylor was on good, if always guarded, terms with Stella Rimington and Eliza Manningham-Buller, two heads of MI5 who believed that the agency badly needed to be more open with the public. Manningham-Buller, an ‘extrovert’, he says, ‘was a prime example of how an individual could influence my ...”

“... rather than ‘stuck in a ghetto’. Like Wolf, Walter sees such figures as Thatcher and MI5’s Stella Rimington as largely positive role models because of what they do for women’s perception of achievement, ‘their normalisation of success’: what they do once success has come is neither here nor there. Thatcher, Walter boldly claims, allowed ...”

“... against this fresh brand of terrorism. In her Dimbleby Lecture in 1993, the then Director-General, Stella Rimington, described terrorism as the Service’s ‘overwhelming focus today’ and boasted of the ‘more than twenty Irish Republican terrorists’ who had ‘been arrested in Great Britain and charged’. Later, she said that ‘some 700 ...”

“... Liz Carlyle, Stella Rimington’s fictional MI5 officer, is a bit of a puzzle to fans of sleuthing, spookery and old-fashioned cloak and dagger. The trouble, to begin with anyhow, is that in Secret Asset, ‘the second Liz Carlyle novel’ (Hutchinson, £12.99), inference and deduction are decidedly lowbrow skills ...”