“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.”

“Parisians were not easy to engage in conversation. Perhaps that was why the Resistance had been so successful.”

“Paris was all so... Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all - the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Child...”

“Oh, well, it might look like a patterned world, laid out in prim design, but to those living there it could never be so simple. They were as alive as she: that old peasant contriving to outwit the ...”

“I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.”