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

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.

Parisians were not easy to engage in conversation. Perhaps that was why the Resistance had been so successful.

You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before...

Reticence was clearly a national characteristic, even if the other person spoke French.

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

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.

Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.

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.

She tried to focus on the element of riddle or at least puzzle contained in the letter and ignore the sense of doom that was sweeping through her like clouds rolling to the shore over...

It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.

Vesta was so good with paperwork – you could hand her a file of drab, seemingly dull information and she’d construct a story from it worthy of a novel.

Mirabelle sat down, dropping into the cushions like a ball being caught in a large leather glove.

Didn’t young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?

This investigation felt difficult, like driving in fog.

If there’s one shade a woman of colour can’t wear it’s got to be the one everyone expects, hasn’t it?

She curled sideways into the milky light of the bedside lamp and began to read.

Mirabelle was always an enigma, and he had the sense that if he pushed her, she’d bolt.

You’ve got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it’s a novel, they know someone’s made it up and they know it’s not real,...

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.

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

She picked up the stout and took a sip. It slid down her throat like silk.

The library is a symbol of freedom.

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

Afternoon drinkers shifted in the gloom as if they sensed new blood.

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...

I’ve always had a keen sense of history. My father was an antiques dealer and he used to bring home boxes full of treasures, and each item always had a tale attached.

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