Sentence of the day

In the 31 December issue of the Spectator, David Crane reviews Lisbon: war in the shadows of the City of Light, 1939-1945 by Neill Lochery, and describes the wartime atmosphere of Portugal’s capital under the dictator Salazar:

It is a city obsessed with fears that never materialise, with kidnaps that never happen and plots that come to nothing; a city of Allied and Axis spies and their informers, feeding on false information in an endless and largely futile cycle of bribery, blackmail, rumour and counter-rumour: a city, in short, so morally bankrupt that even the Duke and Duchess of Windsor do not seem out of place.