That was the problem with time travel, of course (apart from the impossibility) – one would always be a Cassandra, spreading doom with one’s foreknowledge of events. It was quite wearyingly relentless...
Terri would have made the perfect wife for Bob – they could have simply slept their way through married life. Rip van Winkle and Duchess Anaesthesia, the lost, sleepy daughter of the Romanovs.
Sylvie considered that children should be toughened up early, the better to take the blows in later life.
Sylvia loved secrets and even if she didn't have any secrets she made sure that you thought she did. Amelia had no secrets, Amelia knew nothing. When she grew up she planned to know everything and to...
Sometimes you wondered why anyone bothered crawling out of the cradle when what lay ahead was so darn difficult.
Sometimes Teddy wondered if everyone had done well out of the war except for those who had fought in it.
Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the mo...
Shropshire, the fatlands of Gloucestershire,
She was tremendously fond of Ralph. Not hounded by love the way some women were. With Crighton she had been teased endlessly by the idea of it, but with Ralph it was more straightforward. Again not lo...
She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.
She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality the...
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...
Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance.
Moira and the girls and they soon resumed their furtive
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.
It wasn't fair, he thought peevishly. Who said life was fair? his father had said to him a hundred times. He had said the same himself to his own daughter. (It's not fair, Daddy.) Parents were miserab...
If he hadn’t been the father of her children, Viola might have admired Dominic for the way he was so easily able to absolve himself of all obligation simply by asserting his right to self-fulfilment.
I'm not myself, she said and then laughed maniacally, but God knows who I am.
I suppose a better sister would have set about weaving him a shirt from nettles and throwing it over his furred-over body so that he could be released from his enchantment and resume his human form. I...
I am a jewel. I am a drop of blood. I am Ruby Lennox!