#christopher andrew

The secretary of Courtenay Young, who shared a room with Anthony Blunt and was 'in and out of their room all the time', later recalled: "My God, he was a charmer! Poor Anthony! We were all a bit in love with Anthony, you know... He used to wander around with his cod-liver oil and malt, saying, 'That's what Tiggers like for breakfast.' He knew Winnie the Pooh very well. He had a Leslie Howard face - a matinee idol - a rather thin and drawn-looking face but it was the face of Leslie Howard. Everyone was in love with Leslie Howard at that time." When she heard a quarter of a century later that Blunt had confessed to being a Soviet agent: "It was exactly like being in an earthquake - or on quicksand, I couldn't believe it. I really, truly, couldn't believe it... Really, I mean the whole world shook. It really shook for me. You started thinking, 'Who else? What about me? Was I one too?'"

When an earnest South African Communist in Moscow accused him of being a 'petty-bourgeois', [Jomo] Kenyatta was said to have replied: "I don't like this 'petty' thing. Why don't you say I'm a big bourgeois?"

When news reached Los Alamos of [Alan Nunn] May's arrest, the wife of one of the British scientists commented, "I knew him fairly well. But I don't know how you would describe him. He was like - why, he was rather like Klaus [Fuchs] here." Fuchs, who was later revealed as the most important of the British atomic spies, is said to have smiled politely and commented that he did not think May could have told the Russians anything of real importance.

In January 1941, SUMMER, who was living under guard in a house near Cambridge, attempted to escape. He attacked the only guard on duty, telling him unhelpfully, 'It hurts me more than it hurts you,' tied him up and tried to make his getaway on a motorbike belonging to another guard. Strapped to the motorbike was a canoe in which SUMMER planned, optimistically, to cross to the continent. 'Fortunately', wrote Masterman, 'the motorbike, being government property, was not very efficiently maintained', and broke down.

Midway between the wars, Comintern was visibly cross with the CPGB [Communist Party of Great Britain]. Communist leaders, it complained, showed inadequate enthusiasm for denouncing the heresies of the non-Stalinist left. A prominent Comintern bureaucrat protested in 1929: "How does it happen that all the fundamental problems of the Communist International fail to stir our fraternal British party? ... All these problems have the appearance of being forcibly injected into the activities of the British Communist Party... In the British Party there is a sort of special system which may be characterised thus: the party is a society of great friends."

Censorship of a sample of the correspondence of the 138,000 Indian troops who fought on the Western Front in 1915 provided welcome reassurance for the Indian government and the wartime interdepartmental Whitehall committee on Indian 'revolutionary' activity. It revealed no significant support either for Indian 'revolutionaries' or for pan-Islamism, though one censor reported a worrying trend among Indian soldiers to write poetry, which he considered 'an ominous sign of mental disquietude'.

Short-termism has been the distinguishing intellectual vice of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For the first time in recorded history, there has been a widespread assumption that the experience of all previous generations is irrelevant to present policy. Institutions, like individuals, however, diminish their effectiveness if they fail to reflect on past successes and failures. The most senior MI5 officer to write some of its history was Anthony Simkins, who after his retirement collaborated with Sir Harry Hinsley in writing the official history of security and intelligence in the Second World War. "I would have been a better DDG," Simkins said afterwards, "if I had written my history first.

[Kim] Philby's most abominable behaviour was towards his mentally fragile second wife, Aileen, by whom he had five children. Aileen Philby's psychiatrist told the Service that among her problems was her belief in her husband's guilt - which was at least partly responsible for Philby's attempts to "smash Aileen up": "He is convinced that she possesses important security information about her husband and her own Communist past... In [Aileen's] opinion and that of her psychiatrist, Philby had by a kind of mental cruelty to her 'done his best to make her commit suicide'."