As a reader you recognise that feeling when you’re lost in a book? You know the one – when whatever’s going on around you seems less real than what you’re reading and all you want...

Kindness was too painful. It had been a long time since he had had to endure it.

Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.

I didn’t expect to love being online as much as I do. I’ve met some wonderful people and discovered that however arcane some of my interests that there are people out there who are interested...

Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify.

Parts of my 20s and 30s have gone by in a flash but my childhood is with me all the time.

Lately Mirabelle had reflected wistfully if people even noticed her – a smartly dressed woman who came and went along the Promenade, always alone.

Writing about the 1950s has given me tremendous respect for my mother’s generation.

The library is a symbol of freedom.

Most people do a good deal of whatever they do motivated by love. For me, few stories are truly complete without it.

I can’t bear literary snobbery.

The question shouldn’t be, ‘Are we guilty about our Colonial past?’ it should be, ‘Why aren’t we more guilty about our corporate present?

That boy is talented. You don’t develop those gifts in houses or in schools.

It’s part of a writer’s job to be nosy about everything.

Edinburgh is a great big black bastard of a city where there are ghosts of all kinds.

One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It’s the door into that magical reading/writing state – the raw material for making the story real.

There is something particularly fascinating about seeing places you know in a piece of art – be that in a film, or a photograph, or a painting.

He tasted of whisky and his skin was rough where he hadn’t shaved, but Mirabelle kissed him back.

While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or...

Our archives are treasure troves – a testament to many lives lived and the complexity of the way we move forward. They contain clues to the real concerns of day-to-day life that bring the past...

The good thing about the aristocracy – German or English – was that they were easily traced, Mirabelle thought.

You became the sum total of where you lived, where you shopped, which church you went to, how many kids you had and which taxi company you used, and you only associated with people who...

I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.

I fancy you, Kitty Dawson,” a lone boy shouted.

To me, reading through old letters and journals is like treasure hunting. Somewhere in those faded, handwritten lines there is a story that has been packed away in a dusty old box for years.

You couldn’t see the soldiers as people. They were icons.

The best historical stories capture the modern imagination because they are, in many senses, still current – part of a continuum.

Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasn’t true.

The new contract between writers and readers is one I’m prepared to sign up to. I’ve met some fascinating people at events and online. Down with the isolation of writers I say! And long live...

We are home to each other now.

Today women have the rights and equality our Victorian sisters could only dream of, and with those privileges comes the responsibility of standing up and being counted.

I thought of myself mixing the fragrance of a certain day – the heavy musk of the hillside after the rain with the lightness of fresh blossoms doused in the downpour. I thought of each...

Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living. that’s the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred...

An aunt is a safe haven for a child. Someone who will keep your secrets and is always on your side.

Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature.

My fascination with history is as much about the present as it is about the past.

It is one of the benchmarks of a culture I always think – the page at which it operates. A good way to measure it is to order a taxi and see how irate local...

For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.

Can I fetch you something, madam? A cup of tea?’In the old days she’d have been ‘miss’ and he’d have offered her a cocktail.

During the war some of the country’s sharpest minds had looked as if they had been dragged through a hedge backwards.

One of Scotland’s most important cultural exports – stories.

Kissing her is like drinking salted water, he thinks. His thirst only increases.

I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it’s my ambition to create something compelling – something unputdownable and riveting – that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.

Everyone was important during the war. Everyone. We worked together and we won.

Covert operations relied on the unguarded slip, the unconscious choosing of one word over another.

I had never really understood what an adventure life could be, if you followed your heart and did what you really wanted to do, which is what we must all do in the end.

A chap’s impending death has a way of focusing the mind.

Occasionally a particular word or phrase in a letter or diary has sparked an entire plot – like an echo from history, still very alive.

I love stories that suck you in, that you can’t stop reading because you are quite simply there.

People who inspire such contradictory emotions must be worthwhile, I reasoned.