These last weeks, since Christmas, have been odd ones. I have begun to doubt that I knew you as well as I thought. I have even wondered if you wished to keep some part of yourself hidden from me in or...
No doubt after the emperor was overthrown in 1911, your gardener would have joined the rest of the world in cutting the queue and taking on the laws and customs of his adoptive land. Before that, his...
My God, it can recognise another human being when it's hit over the head with one.
Men do, I've found, accept the most errant nonsense from a well dressed woman
Marsh looked at me sideways, causing a brief stir of familiarity. You liked the library?It was all I could do to keep her from bolting herself inside, Alistair told him.With mock indignation, I protes...
Isolate her, and however abundant the food or favourable the temperature, she will expire in a few days not of hunger or cold, but of loneliness.
Impossibility is a log thrown on the fires of love.
I was merely going to say that I hope you realise that guilt is a poor foundation for a life, without other motivations beside it.
I took the broom and made a wild sweep along the workbench, and an edge of the unwieldy head sent a tray of tools flying. Patrick picked up a chipped chisel and looked at me as if I had attacked his s...
I think not. I find short hair too much fuss, always needing combing and cutting. Long hair is much easier, oddly enough. There
Holmes, didn’t you tell me a few weeks ago that there has been a series of burglaries from inns and public houses in Eastbourne? I hardly think two qualifies as a series, Russell. You are interrupting...
He was a talkative man and jabbered away the whole time as his horse meandered about the road. It saved us from having to construct a story for him, though by the time he left us in Banbury, I was mos...
Guessing is a weakness brought on by indolence and should never be confused with intuition.
Don’t stride so, Russell! Holmes whispered fiercely. Throw your boots out in front of you as you walk and let your elbows stick out a bit. It would help if you let your mouth hang open stupidly, and f...
And why was this third dream still with me, lingering at my shoulder like some telegraph boy awaiting a reply?
Were she not aware that he was more than a man who could make plants grow. And
Since people who discovered bodies in odd places were often the people who had put them there in the first place.
You translate it, please. I have worked hard to forget what Greek I once knew.
The past is but the beginning of a beginning. —H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future
The night air moved up towards the Downs, washing over sea and orchard. I breathed it in, and thought that henceforth, loneliness would smell to me like fermenting apples.