Home’, it had struck her on the torturous drive back to London, wasn’t Egerton Gardens, wasn’t even Fox Corner. Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past.
He was one of those people who stared at you with a meaningful smile on their face, as if he was somehow intellectually and spiritually superior, when the fact was he was simply socially inept.
A simple acceptance of what comes to us, regarding it as neither bad nor good. as he would have it, Dr Kellet continued ... It means become who you are, he said.
A boy grows and marries and leaves. He belongs to another woman, but a girl always belongs to her mother.
White lilies, the kind you would give to a bride or a corpse.
Those fateful words We are now at war with Germany, and for several hours felt strangely numb. She tried to phone Pamela
The dogs had got into the graveyard and were now moving like Hoovers across the ground, their noses down, their tails up, their small dog brains consumed with the idea of uncharted territory and a tho...
Strangers? Millie’s swan song on the stage, the last
Let’s face it, no one warned you about anything.
Her proficiency in the Classics would somehow stand her in better stead when opening and closing filing-cabinet drawers and conducting endless searches among a sea of buff-coloured folders. It wasn’t...
He inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brev...
He had a firm voice, a nice low register that spoke of both kindness and unassailable authority, which seemed the perfect combination in a man—in the romance novels her mother had been fond of, anyway
Bluestocking, Nancy. Married life has quite changed something
Anthroposophy, spiritualism. Everyone needs to make sense
A common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly. Ursula
[She] went around with a beatific smile on her face that could be very irritating if you yourself weren't feeling beatific.
You said five little words to someone--How can I help you?--and it was as if you'd mortgaged your soul out to them.
You don’t see the point of English literature?’ ‘I don’t see the point of studying it. Surely one just reads it?
You could guarantee a decent cup of coffee in Betty's, but it went beyond the decent coffee and the respectable girls (and women) who had been parcelled up some time in the 1930s and freshly unwrapped...
Writing felt like something she knew, although she only knew it from the other side – reading – and it took her a while to realize that writing and reading were completely different activities – polar...