“He tasted of whisky and his skin was rough where he hadnt shaved, but Mirabelle kissed him back.”

“Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living.thats the whole point of keeping papers. It doesnt matter if its a hundred years or only a few wee...”

“Didnt young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?”

“It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.”

“Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasnt true.”

“Vesta was so good with paperwork you could hand her a file of drab, seemingly dull information and shed construct a story from it worthy of a novel.”

“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.”

“The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.”

“Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”

“But, of course, you might be asking yourself, 'Am I a feminist? I might not be. I don't know! I still don't know what it is! I'm too knackered and confused to work it out. That curtain pole really ...”

“... a health drink company called Fuel, founded by a former tank commander in the British Army and an extreme-sports enthusiast, offers a liquid fry-up combining the flavors of bacon, sausage, poac...”