As Gambit and Purdey view Miss McKay's sculptures, Purdey calls one of them "Aphrodite at the Water-Hole". This is the title of the masterpiece long worked on by incompetent would-be artist Tony Hancock in The Rebel, 1961.
Masgard is based on "Mr Memory" from Alfred Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps - he too memorized secret documents.