At Bristol, electrical engineering has 6.8 applicants per place, while engineering design has 3.8, and engineering maths has 2.8.National figures of ratios of applicants to places show how much variety there can be between subjects, although like all statistics, they need to be read with care. Small departments can quickly look vastly oversubscribed, while large ones can mop up hundreds of students. Last year's figures show that physics, agricultural sciences, general engineering, mineral technology and linguistics were all good areas to head for if you wanted to avoid the crowds. Medicine and law were the places to be if you liked a lot of company.

While this year's figures show increasing numbers heading for pre-clinical medicine, medical technology, general studies, nutrition and business studies, and a decline in applications for computer science, information systems, electronic engineering, social policy and anthropology.. Maybe he was the brilliant spymaster whom some have likened to a real-life version of John le Carr? fictional Karla, the great Soviet adversary of George Smiley Or he might just have been very lucky. Either way however, Rem Krasilnikov was head of KGB counter-intelligence against the United States during its golden age of the 1980s, presiding over the virtually total destruction of the CIA's networks in the Soviet Union. Within a few years, by accident or design, he had a string of bluechip defectors and moles. The first (and least important) was Edward Lee Howard, who fled to the Soviet Union in 1984 after being fired by the CIA as he was due to be posted to Moscow.

The following year brought two almost unimaginably precious catches within the US itself, as first Aldrich Ames and then Robert Hanssen, a senior FBI agent, took the Soviet shilling to sell their knowledge to Moscow. The information provided by Ames in particular, as head of the Soviet counter-intelligence desk at Langley, helped Krasilnikov catch practically every CIA agent in his country.As plum after plum fell into his lap, Krasilnikov added insult to Washington's injury by keeping quiet about the detection of an agent – only to pick him up when he was meeting his CIA handler. The latter, usually a diplomat, would then be expelled amid much self-righteous indignation on the part of the Soviet foreign ministry. The writer David Wise, an authority on Cold War espionage, later commented that the US would have been better off with no intelligence operation in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, such was the damage Ames wrought.Despite the immensity of his triumph, Krasilnikov was virtually unknown in the West beyond a coterie of specialists. His colleagues referred to the silver-haired figure at KGB headquarters at Yasnevo near Moscow as the "professor of counter-intelligence". But his name is barely mentioned in books on the period.Spying for the advancement of Communism was in Krasilnikov's blood.