The Irregulars Quotes

“Lindbergh’s America Firsters, and the Nazi-run fifth columnists”
― Jennet Conant, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

“a gaudy beacon of hope amid all the uncertainty.”
― Jennet Conant, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

“He had been very moved by a story he had recently heard about an old Scottish dowager who had lost three sons in the war. All three had been in the RAF. She was the sort of “fossilized” creature with a centuries-old manor house that one would normally stear clear of, but this Lady MacRobert, upon being told of the death of her last boy, gave a tremendous sum of money to the RAF to pay for the construction of a new Sterling bomber. When the plane was completed, she asked them to paint on its side, “Lady MacRobert’s Reply.” It struck Dahl as “something really dauntless, really indomitable,” and he remembered thinking, “You really cannot defeat such people.”
― Jennet Conant, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

“Our best information is that the forces of isolationism, a front here for Nazism and Fascism, is gaining, not losing ground…. We feel there is German money and German direction behind the America First movement, though many of its followers may not know it and would in fact be shocked to know it. If we can pin a Nazi contact or Nazi money on the isolationists, they will lose many of their followers. It might be the deciding factor in America’s entry in the war, if the American public knew the truth.”
― Jennet Conant, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

“There is no great trick to doing research,” Ogilvy later observed. “The problem is to get people to use it—particularly when the research reveals that you have been making mistakes.” Most people, he found, had “a tendency to use research as a drunkard uses a lamppost—for support, not for illumination.”
― Jennet Conant, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington