“What if?’ history is a tricky game, but there is no doubt that the senior planners of D-Day – including Eisenhower and the British general Bernard Montgomery – believed that the Double Cross operation had played a pivotal role in the victory.”

To disarm while being best armed, out of an elevation of sensibility-that is the means to real peace.

Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.

Libraries are not just for reading in, but for sociable thinking, exploring, exchanging ideas and falling in love. They were never silent.

I love telling stories, and am almost entirely unable to keep a secret.

Technology will not change that, for even in the starchiest heyday of Victorian self-improvement, libraries were intended to be meeting places of the mind, recreational as well as educational.

The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy.

If you put into one room everyone who considered themselves a Nietzschean, there would be a bloodbath.

Doubts arise because of an absence of surrender.

Never doubt yourself. There are enough people who do this.

A cook should double one sense have: for he Should taster for himself and master be.

Realisation is our nature. It is nothing new to be gained. What is new cannot be eternal. Therefore there is no need for doubting if one would lose or gain the Self.

Our intention to regard the closing of the Straits as a casus belli was communicated…to the foreign ministers of those states which had supported international navigation in the Straits in 1957 and thereafter.

Nobody doubts that he exists, though he may doubt the existence of God. If he finds out the truth about himself and discovers his own source, this is all that is required.

As the music played over the speakers and the waterfall in the pool filled the silence around us, I knew that without a doubt I had just been ruined.

The present joys of life we doubly taste, By looking back with pleasure to the past.