What a good husband you are, Nancy said afterward, always taking your wife's side rather than your mother's. It's the side of reason I am on, Teddy said. It just so happens that that's where you're al...
Ursula tried to remember what her own last words to her father had been. A nonchalant 'See you later,' she concluded. The final irony. 'We never know when it will be the last time,' she said...
This was beauty too. Was there anything in nature that wasn't?
They all chose Indian names for themselves. Teddy was Little Fox (Naturally, Ursula said). Nancy was Little Wolf (Honiahaka in Cheyenne, Mrs. Shawcross said. She had a book she referred to). Mrs. Shaw...
There’s too much history in York, the past is so crowded that sometimes it feels as if there’s no room for the living.
There was a strangeness in the shimmering air, a sense of imminence that made Ursula’s chest feel full, as if her heart was growing. It was a kind of high holiness—she could think of no other way of d...
The world inside his head was so much better than the world outside his head.
The triumph of the human spirit, the new nursing sister said, new enough to talk about positive outcomes and enhancement programmes—emollient management-speak, meaningless to most of the residents of...
The reason she had taken the long way round was on the unlikely chance that she might engineer an accidental meeting with Benjamin Cole.
The purpose of Art is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself. SYLVIE BERESFORD TODD
The only way to stop the tears was to keep drinking the whisky.
The man who was speaking had a degree in jargon and a doctorate in nonsense.
The blame generally has to fall somewhere, Miss Armstrong. Women and the Jews tend to be first in line, unfortunately.
The Knights’ Code, which he had learned by heart from Scouting for Boys, a book he frequently turned to in times of uncertainty, even now in his self-exile from the movement, demanded that Chivalry re...
That was the one thing June had been terrified of having - a standard life, an ordinary life, a life like her parents’ - living in a pink sandstone semi-detached villa in the suburbs with a neat garde...
Sometimes it takes just one good man, Ursula said to him during the war. Neither of them could think of an example from history, except the Buddha perhaps, Ursula offered. I’m not convinced by the rea...
She... applied makeup, enough to have made an effort, not enough to be blatantly a woman...
She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.
She had one of those husky voices that sounded as if she were permanently coming down with a cold. Men seemed to find that sexy in a woman, which Jackson thought was odd because it made women sound le...
She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is. Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of h...
