Turning to Turnip, Miss Dempsey said, ‘Do you think?’. ‘As little as I can,’ Turnip replied honestly.

Patience is only a virtue when there is something worth waiting for.

Word of advice, sister mine. If you want to keep your papers private, don’t write ‘Private’ on the cover. It set the mater right off. It was all I could do to stop her sniffing...

Whether I like it or not, most of my images of what various historical periods feel, smell, or sound like were acquired well before I set foot in any history class. They came from Margaret...

Quite definitely a Bingley

Old books exert a strange fascination for me — their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.

They were close enough that he could feel the hurried beat of her heart. He could feel Charlotte’s indecision in every word she didn’t say and every move she didn’t make. She was tense with...

Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends,...

Right now, I couldn’t have cared less if someone had waltzed across the room in a large flower costume with a sign saying GET YOUR BLACK TULIPS HERE. Every nerve in my body was on...

As a historian, I found myself all too often treating my historical subjects like fictional characters, malleable entities that could be made to do one thing or another, whose motivations could be speculated upon endlessly,...

He admired her for throwing off her aristocratic shackles — his terms, that — and making her own way in the world.He didn’t realize that the truth was so much more complex, so much less...

Such kindness wasn’t a gift but a goad, scraping against one’s skin like a yoke of thorns. She would have preferred him stiff, defensive, even offensive.

Amy wondered if Bonaparte could declare war on Miss Gwen alone without breaking his peace with England

This was what the poets couldn’t put in their poetry, she thought dumbly, the rush of desire so fierce and pure it made one shake, all on the force of a word.

Tell them I have the headache–no, the plague! I need something nice and contagious.

LIPID (Last Idiot Person I Dated) syndrome: a largely undiagnosed but pervasive disease that afflicts single women.

I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt...

It would be, like all of Pammy’s parties, hot and crowded and filled with impossibly glamorous people with hip bones so sharp they could qualify as concealed weapons.

But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my...