“We stopped and listened. Just on the cusp of hearing I detected a rhythmic pounding, more a vibration in the concrete than a sound.'Drums,' I said and then because I couldn't resist it. 'Drums in t...”

“I was tempted to tell her it was because we were British and actually had a sense of humour, but I try not to be cruel to foreigners, especially when they're that strung out.”

“This is why magic is worse even than quantum physics. Because, while both spit in the eye of common sense, I've never yet had a Higgs bosun turn up and try to have a conversation with me.”

“The British have always been madly overambitious, and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight.”

“Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.”

“You know there's always things in life that you have to do despite the fact that you know for certain the outcome is going to be messy, painful, humiliating, or all three.”

“She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.”

“For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

“He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.”

“And oh, how she pitched herself into things. She would draw pictures all day long for weeks on end, then throw out the pencils and never draw another thing. Then it was embroidery with her, she had...”

“I knew the woodsy fragrance that accompanied Reed was his natural scent. It was one of the many things that made him hard to resist.”

“My whole world started to tilt. I could feel it, sliding ever so slightly off center.”