Reticence was clearly a national characteristic, even if the other person spoke French.

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 wasn’t true.

Vesta was so good with paperwork – you could hand her a file of drab, seemingly dull information and she’d construct a story from it worthy of a novel.

Didn’t 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.

Covert operations relied on the unguarded slip, the unconscious choosing of one word over another.

The good thing about the aristocracy – German or English – was that they were easily traced, Mirabelle thought.

This investigation felt difficult, like driving in fog.

Mirabelle was always an enigma, and he had the sense that if he pushed her, she’d bolt.

Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.

A chap’s impending death has a way of focusing the mind.

The scepticism which men affect towards their higher inspirations is often not an honest doubt, but a guilty negligence, and is a sign of narrow mind and defective wisdom.

O God let your face shine on us!

Loneliness means when you have no one to celebrate your success with and share your pains.

Haiti is open for business!

Cluttered closets mean a cluttered mind.

The superiority of the gold standard consists in the fact that the value of gold develops independent of political actions.

I believe I have lots of time. I have to believe that, that it won't come back, and that that's why I'm in good hands. But I also do live my life by putting nothing off.

If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?.

The true felicity of life is to be free from anxieties and pertubations; to understand and do our duties to God and man, and to enjoy the present without any serious dependence on the future.

When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves