“In wartime people took action because of what they believed in. In peacetime people were driven by their private concerns.”

“Lately Mirabelle had reflected wistfully if people even noticed her a smartly dressed woman who came and went along the Promenade, always alone.”

“Wellsted will remember this moment for the rest of his life. It is the first time he desires something for himself that is not dedicated to his own advancement. It is the moment he falls in love.”

“She was herself in their company but a very specific version of herself.”

“It took a certain kind of person to come from luxury and seek out danger.”

“Sometimes a persons first assumption was very telling. It revealed how they perceived the situation.”

“While I'm frustrated at the amount I'm expected to take on in the present, the 1950s woman was frustrated by being excluded - not being allowed to take things on at all.”

“In the 1950s at least less was expected of women. Now we're supposed to build a career, build a home, be the supermum that every child deserves, the perfect wife, meet the demands of elderly parent...”

“After all, she knows how painful it can be not to follow your heart and she knows about the obstacles and about loyalty and duty and about the countless kinds of love. If only Eve and Myles were fr...”

“The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad's third language, and much of that seems piquant in his us...”

“The goblins have been after me ever since I helped the Coven drive them out of Essex. (They were gobbling up drunk people in club bathrooms, and the Mage was worried about losing regional slang.) I...”

“Up and down' is Irish for anything at all--from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.”

“I wasn't like a Fifties dad.”