“Over the drop, a luminous pond lay below them like a pale magic lantern. It was as if the moon had plummeted into the water and smashed open. Engulfed in darkness, with only a scatter of stars abov...”

“Maria didnt fear the sea but, as taught by her father, she respected its power. In her experience the ocean had no intent to drown travellers.”

“A flock of small birds took off from the wall of the fort. They moved like a length of dark silk caught by the breeze as they headed out to sea. Behind them, the sky was the colour of forget-me-not...”

“He noticed that he felt calmer now she was here, still in that grey dress with her dowdy hat, the air around her redolent with orchid oil. Perhaps all women in England had this effect. Perhaps they...”

“A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his minds eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a wo...”

“I pride myself on making my own decisions, sir," she said. "I do not welcome gentlemen making them for me.”

“He had spent much of his childhood perched on the coast, with the taste of salt in the air: this was a place of woodland and river, mysterious and secretive in a different way from St. Mawes, the l...”

“A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.”

“[The official prosecutors] ... were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.”

“In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands lost their lives, a young Spaniard called Jeronimo Rugera was standing beside...”