Banville's The Untouchable:

I just finished reading this today, and it's very good. It's about Victor Maskell, who is a fictionalised version of one of the Cambridge spies (aaprently Anthony Blunt, though I've never actually heard of him). Maskell spied for the Soviets in the late thirties and while a member of British intelligence during the war. The book is set probably in the 80s, and it covers the time after he is publicly uncovered as a Russian spy. I really recommend it for anyone who likes spy novels, even though it's far from typical for the genre.

Anyways, some quotes:

On mathematics:

The discipline held a deep appeal for me. Its procedures had the mark of an arcane ritual, another secret doctrine like that which I was soon to discover in Marxism. I relished the though of being privy to a specialised language which even in its most rarified form is an exact--well, plausible--expression of empirical reality. Mathematics speaks the world...

and

Kitsch is to art as physics is to mathematics--its technology.

On Soviet views of the English:

Accustomed to tsardom, old style and new, they could not understand that our sceptred ruler does not rule, but is only a sort of surrogate parent of the nation, and not for a moment to be taken seriously. At the end of the war, when Labour got in, I suspect Moscow believed it would be only a matter of time before the royal family, little princesses and all, would be taken to the Palace basement and put up against the wall.

On similarities between the Russians and the Irish:

I too came of an extreme and instinctual race...we shared the bleak romanticism of our two very different races, the legacy of dispossession, and, especially, the lively anticipation of eventual revenge, which, when it came to politics, could be made to pass for optism.

and

Another IRA bomb on Oxford Street tonight. No one killed, but a glorious amount of damage and disruption. How determined they are. All that rage, that race-hatred. We should have been like that. We should have had no mercy, no qualms. We would have brought down a whole world.

On leaving London:

"I shall miss London," Hartmann said. "Kensington Gore, the Brompton Road, Tooting Bec--is there really a place called Tooting Bec? And Beauchamp Place, which only yesterday I at last learned how to pronounce in the correct way. Such a waste, all this valuable knowledge."

On Americans:

[I]t was not just the American individual that won my admiration...but the American system itself, so demanding, so merciless, undeluded as to the fundamental murderousness and venality of humankind and at the same time so grimly, unflaggingly optimistic.

and

Mytchett said that where Americans are concerned, one mustn't on any account bring up matters of race, homosexuality, or Communism, and Boy said, "What you're telling me is not to make a pass at Paul Robeson."

On betrayal:

"What you're asking me to do is to betray my friends," I said. "I won't do that."
"You've betrayed everything else." Still smiling, still gently avuncular.
"But what you mean by everything," I said, "is nothing to me. To be capable of betraying something, you must first believe in it."