He noticed that he felt calmer now she was here, still in that grey dress with her dowdy hat, the air around her redolent with orchid oil. Perhaps all women in England had this effect. Perhaps they all smelled of flowers and exuded a calm and measured purpose. He couldn’t remember.

The world is changing and you’re only just becoming accustomed to it. You’re changing, I suppose. You’ve changed since I’ve known you.’‘How?’‘You’ve come more alive.

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.

I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion.

There was something indomitable about Maria – like Britannia. He’d heard that she kept her head during a Chilean earthquake the year before when men of greater age and experience had panicked. Afterwards she was discovered calmly taking notes, recording the way the land hand risen, for publication, she said.

Over the drop, a luminous pond lay below them like a pale magic lantern. It was as if the moon had plummeted into the water and smashed open. Engulfed in darkness, with only a scatter of stars above, the place felt like a bright secret – something ancient and precious.

Maria didn’t fear the sea but, as taught by her father, she respected its power. In her experience the ocean had no intent to drown travellers.

A flock of small birds took off from the wall of the fort. They moved like a length of dark silk caught by the breeze as they headed out to sea. Behind them, the sky was the colour of forget-me-nots. The sun blazed.

In a heartbeat, he understands why religions are born on the sands – there is nothing here for a man but his own mind.

When you fake emotion for a living, when you make your money providing fantasies for other people, tuning into their worlds and indulging them, you don’t invite someone into your world very easily.

I am more one for the story, I think, than the action.

Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real.

I'm a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events.

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 another.

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.

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 to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too.

It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on one’s judgement.

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

Sometimes you don’t even have to have sex at all, and for that kind of sicko, you charge double.

She wishes her grandmother had not been so protective, and that she understood better what passes between a man and woman. As it is, she simply enjoys the feelings and wonders if they are what lightning is made of, for everything comes back to the weather. Tears like rain. Smiles like the sun. Hair as dry as sand and fear like the dark ocean.

His heart is pounding and when he kisses her it is as if the whole of Riyadh disappears – the wide sky, the hard surface of the roof, the date palms and the water wells.

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

Such a night cannot be shaken from a woman’s memory. Such a night changes your life forever.

All those kisses. There must have been a thousand. They engulfed me like some kind of all consuming dream where I became very alive and very relaxed at the same time.

It occurred to me that as a man I could do anything, everything I wanted.

What was it that marked me as a woman and was I prepared to let it go?

We had laid down the law : no chocolate, no sex.

When the first book out my sister-in-law read it and we were chatting at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and she said, "Oh my God, chapter six, sex and a murder," and her five year old wandered into the kitchen and said, "Sixty hamburgers?

Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.

I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.

When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time.

I decided to coin the term 'cosy crime noir' for Brighton Belle. That is 'cosy crime' for today's sensibilities because there is that slightly edgy element to it.

I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. That's not to say that graphic violence does not exist. It's just that I find it quite harrowing and I much prefer if it isn't completely outlined for me because my imagination can do that.

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 I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, "this character's a murderer! Look who did it!.

Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.

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

While I'm frustrated at the amount I'm expected to take on in the present, the 1950s woman was frustrated by being excluded - not being allowed to take things on at all.

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'm not sure how much easier it is for a mother to balance her life now - have we simply swapped one set of restrictions for another?

I was asked the other day in which era I would choose to live. As a historical novelist, it comes up sometimes. As a woman I'd have to say I'd like to live in the future - I want to see where these centuries of change are leading us.

In the 1950s at least less was expected of women. Now we're supposed to build a career, build a home, be the supermum that every child deserves, the perfect wife, meet the demands of elderly parents, and still stay sane.

Looking at my life through the lens of history has made me increasingly grateful to standout women who pushed those boundaries to make the changes from which I have benefited.

I believe the era of the militant lady is back.

Often we don't notice the stringent rules to which our culture subjects us.

Change occurs slowly. Very often a legal change might take place but the cultural shift required to really accept its spirit lingers in the wings for decades.

As a novelist it is my job to tell stories that inspire and entertain but I am increasingly mindful that many of these historical tales (which of themselves are fascinating) relate directly to our issues in society today.

An important part of deciding where we want to go, as a society and culture, is knowing where we have come from, and indeed, how far we have come.

The net has provided a level playing field for criticism and comment - anyone and everyone is entitled to their opinion - and that is one of its greatest strengths.

I've been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it's no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.

You couldn’t predict what was going to happen for one simple reason: people.

They march into the future to the rhythm of the past.

You have no future when the past rules you.

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 alive.

If we don't value the people who inspire us (and money is one mark of that) then what kind of culture are we building?

I think that everyone has something that they will kill for.

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.

I can't bear literary snobbery.

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature.

In wartime people took action because of what they believed in. In peacetime people were driven by their private concerns.

Edinburgh is alive with words.

A writer is like a stick of rock - the words go right through.

A word out of place or an interesting choice of vocabulary can spawn a whole character.

I am completely unflustered by whichever medium people choose to read my words. I'm just delighted they're reading them at all!

When you're depressed you retreat and you go into a smaller world. This is why Brighton worked well for the story, because it's a smaller world than London.

We can learn so much looking outside our core field of expertise.

You can’t trust anyone you have to pay, and really, they can’t trust you.

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.

If you've been hurt and you've grieved and you've been through the mill, it takes a long time to get over it.

I pride myself on making my own decisions, sir," she said. "I do not welcome gentlemen making them for me.

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.

Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer's job.

A paucity of material can open up just as many possibilities.

I spend a lot of time imagining things - in fact, you could say that imagining things is my job.

Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.

The curve of my waist in a tight fitting summer dress can really make me new friends.

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 too.

Most fellas like the races, though, Miss. It’s only human nature

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 years or only a few weeks. It’s all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers.

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?

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

I'm in my 40s and I'm constantly surprised by how much my childhood still plays a part in my life.

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

At length, when I considered it, I realized that the best of my actions were small things. Picking flowers and cooking food for my mother when she had been unwell, spending an afternoon with the children, sending money to my sister or kissing Henry’s tiny head as he slept in the nursery before I left. I thought of every detail and afterwards I felt better. Hellfire and brimstone have never appealed to me and I admit I become easily confused thinking of right and wrong. But I do understand kindness.

The jungle is alive. It’s dangerous as a living nightmare and brimful of hostility.

The moon was low but not full. The men set out along the dock in conversation. As they dropped onto the dark beach, Simmons declared, ‘There can be no better place in the world than this.’Henderson had to agree. The beach was beautiful. The stars lit the sand and balmy air rode in as the waves washed up on paradise

It had occurred to her many times that on board it didn’t matter where you were coming from or where you were heading. Each voyage had its own charisma. Like writing a book – word by word – or crossing a country – step by step – each minute had to be lived moment by moment.

It was as if she was a dream, like London, which he could not entirely grasp and of which he was not worthy. He wanted to be part of it but had forgotten how. It seemed extraordinary and strange that this paragon among women had condescended to travel on his ship. In fact, she’d insisted upon it. Her presence was at once otherworldly and familiar, none of which explained why his brain ceased to function when he was in her company.

The smell of roasting meat rose from the street stalls in a sizzle and a fiddle player begged for coin as he rasped a haunting melody. Life could not be more perfect.

The daily chocolate left Will in high spirits, so that some days he believed he could wheel with the gulls that fished the foaming water close to shore. Now that he felt so free, it came to him that the corner of England, which up till now had been his whole universe, was in fact only a scrap of a boundless realm.

A journey is an achievement, Maria, just as much as a mathematical proof.

She enjoyed the sights and sounds of the dockside – ports were places of freedom.

Her eyes betrayed no shock at the sights of the quay as they unfolded – not the sweating deckhands, the prostitutes crowding the ship, the hubbub of stalls, including one where three slaves were for sale, their ankles manacled. She might as well have been walking through a country garden as she moved inexorably away from the water.

We might give her presents, tell some tales, but would she ever be able to really understand what the journey had been like for us?

It seemed to me that these months of watching and listening, second-guessing words and phrases, seeking so much that was new, had somehow changed me.

For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.

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

Mirabelle always ate her lunch on Brighton beach if the weather was in any way passable, but out of sheer principle she never paid tuppence for a chair. We did not win the war to have to pay to sit down, she frequently found herself thinking.

My father could talk about the Romany way of life and its culture. He could talk about freedom and the Scottish spirit. But that was all he could talk about. I was desperate for someone to talk to but there was just nobody there.

There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument.

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

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

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?

He cannot think. He can scarcely breathe. But he has no desire to either, he simply wants to keep kissing her.

When you want something badly enough it’s amazing what you’ll ignore.

Wellsted will remember this moment for the rest of his life. It is the first time he desires something for himself that is not dedicated to his own advancement. It is the moment he falls in love.

The scraps of information she’d gathered knocked against each other, like balls in a pinball machine in one of the arcades on the front. Secrets drew her in every time – the unsaid.

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

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

This investigation felt difficult, like driving in fog.

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

Writing is a profession that has no real career structure and your best advice when you hit a difficulty is probably going to come from another writer one or two rungs on the career ladder ahead of you.

If you tempted a poor man with a fortune, who could blame the fellow for taking what he could?

Writers have a well-deserved reputation for being eccentric. Everything you've heard is true.

There are as many different kinds of books as there are writers - as many different responses as there are readers.

Everyone assumes writers spend their time lounging around, writing and occasionally striking a pose whilst having a think.

Being able to read well in public and talk about your work in an engaging fashion is part of most writers' job specification.

I hope that, whatever happens within the publishing industry, because of the increased control writers have of their own careers, better sales information and the advent of the internet, that ultimately this change in our working environment will be a change for the better.

Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre.

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.

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 Twitter.

It's always been important for writers to be disciplined but now even more so. In addition to the traditional displacement activities like cleaning the fridge or eating cake writers are faced with a plethora of online possibilities (some of which may be professionally worthwhile as well as interesting and fun). As a writer it's important to learn how to focus so you can do both as and when you need to.

Crime writers, I've noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven't been caught yet!

Writers are, as a profession, nothing if not eccentric.

Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope - to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that way, to maybe, just now and then, to change the world.

Writers need each other.

I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn.

One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.

Many existing top 20 Scottish writers have flourished in part because of good turns done by institutions, arts community, libraries and bookshops.

Scotland consistently produces world-class writers.

Writers are a product of where we come from but by looking at alternatives to the culture in which we live, we can find ways to change and hopefully improve it.

It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes.

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.

I had loved poetry and the theatre. Now I loved adventure more.

I am torn between the freedom of this adventure and the benefits of civilization despite its constraints.

He prefers his adventures second hand.

I knew that I was talented. I was positive about that. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was talented at, but I was ambitious enough to wait it out and see what turned up.

Sometimes life isn’t what we want, it’s what we get.

It is through our extended family that we first learn to compromise and come to an understanding that even if we don't always agree about things we can still love and look out for each other.

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

Those who have not been stung will hardly fear a bee the same as those who have.

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

He’s more a shape in a drape than a hep cat

The financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.

As it stands there is a very strong argument that as the book trade becomes increasingly corporate it's our literary heritage that is at risk - a vital part of our culture.

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 people get if it is late.

I'm proud of the culture I come from - we're a small country and a close-knit community.

On of the prerequisites for my mobile phone is that I have to be able to fling it at a wall if I lose my temper.

Only a man with nothing to hide could make that kind of racket.

He often came back ‘all thinky’ from work.

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

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 had the same responses on their list.

Aunts offer kids an opportunity to try out ideas that don't chime with their parents and they also demonstrate that people can get on, love each other and live together without necessarily being carbon copies.

She was herself in their company but a very specific version of herself.

It took a certain kind of person to come from luxury and seek out danger.

The telling of any character is what they do in a different situation.

I have become very aware how under-represented are the stories of the underprivileged and undervalued. Our records are, in general, very male and if not always the material of the rich, certainly (for obvious reasons) the material of the literate.

On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they'd liked what I'd written and by the by, more about them than I'd ever elicit from two minutes in a tent at a book festival, stuck behind a signing desk.

It may take a village to raise a baby, but hell! it takes an army to produce a book.

It's entirely possible to base an entire book on a long-forgotten letter.

I've always been attracted to stories about rebels - things that are unusual and sometimes dangerous.

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

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

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.

What used to be edgy (divorces) has become mainstream and what used to be mainstream (racism and sexism) has become shocking.

In wartime, she thought to herself, you don’t call a death murder.

We are home to each other now.

We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.

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

I've found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It's possible to make a connection with any kind of writing - as long as the writing is good.

I'm very aware we are the first generation ever to have such incredible opportunities to express ourselves publicly to a worldwide audience.

I believe that being able to communicate directly with readers is a boon. I certainly enjoy it as much as they do.

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

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

At the end of the day, that's what a family is - a group of different people who accept each other.

Researching books gets you into nothing but trouble.

Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.

In the industry, trying out new genres is not always encouraged but what I've discovered is that as a writer, a jaunt outside my comfort zone generally brings new skills to the main body of my work.

For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it.

I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful.

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

I love writing, and just as much, I love undertaking research.

The space where I write is in my head, I suppose.

I jealously guard my research time and I love fully immersing myself in those dusty old books and papers. It's one of the most enjoyable parts of my job.

When a chap is passionate, the readership can sense it.

Being a writer is a more difficult job than people imagine.

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

Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist.

I'm a professional writer and I consider it part of my job to publicise my work and these days part of that job is done online.

As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective.

Today is the anniversary of my husband’s death," Maria announced. It was a dramatic statement, but the occasion seemed to demand it. "And I am going to leave.

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

It’s not until you’re older that you realise how important the things that happened to you when you were a kid are. Even things you only half remember.

There was something unbearable about the damp, dark earth closing over a coffin and the still, empty flesh that was inside. She had attended a hundred funerals, but when you really loved someone there was something too final about a burial. Something brutal.

An eerie atmosphere leeched from the soot-damaged walls. It was as if the house had died, and yet she felt she belonged here. It was as if the old place wanted to claim her from the grave.

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

Google maps are one thing but there's no substitute for pounding the beat and I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to break into the back of the houses on Belgrave Place. Once I even for followed by a suspicious householder - I'd been hanging around staring at the exterior of his flat for too long.

In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into.

In crime books it's possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it's new. Nowadays it's part of our world and we can simply assume that knowledge if we write about it.

The sky was a sparkling succession of black diamonds on black velvet made crystal clear by the blackout.

New technologies and resources offer exciting opportunities. They democratise access to information.

Sometimes a person’s first assumption was very telling. It revealed how they perceived the situation.

People see what they expect to see.

I didn’t want to give up my job and join the ranks of the Doing Fuck All brigade no matter how much money I had in the bank.

I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business.

The smell of tobacco usually reminded Mirabelle of being a child – coming downstairs in the morning when the dinner party her parents had hosted the night before was cleared away, but the scent of cigars still lingered.

The law don’t like jazz clubs. No one wants anything to do with that kind of trouble.

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.

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, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.

The hard fact is that writing is available to readers because of market factors as much as particular writing talent.

This is the cusp of an age at least as exciting and as brimful of potential as the early days of the printing press.

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

History was my favourite subject at school and in my spare time I read historical novels voraciously from Heidi to the Scarlet Pimpernel and from Georgette Heyer to Agatha Christie.

The fifties is a decade when every year is markedly different from the one before and after. That doesn't happen every decade. 1983 isn't that much different from 1986. But 1953 is very different from 1956.

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 little bottle as the essence of a happy day or a sad one. I mixed the scent of a lonely moment – sandalwood and bergamot lingering over a rich, peppery base.

Cases fired by emotion rather than money were dangerous.

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

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

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

Mrs Beaumont shrugged. ‘Dougie travelled light in life,’ she said. ‘He knew it was people who were important.

The smog curled between the streetlamps and the spokes of the wrought iron framework. It seemed through your body and into your bones.

I have a very strong sense that we only know where we are by looking clearly at where we've come from.

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

Once they have dedicated themselves to a cause, women will fight to the end for it.

I find it inspiring to actively choose which traditions to celebrate and also come up with new ideas for traditions of my own.

No one's book is perfect.

If peace came it would have to do so when there had been time to allow the hatred to grow out of people’s thinking.

The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.

Having instant feedback on twitter to research material I'm considering is an enormous help.

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

Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital.

Once you’re on the pleasure express, it’s hard to get off and switch to another, slower service.

Muscat is like a mind-altering drug. A stroll in its streets is like getting drunk for the first time

The devil was always in the detail. And here the detail was certainly devilish.

There was something about Maria Graham that you could believe in – a slice of home. If not unique in her travelling, she was at least extraordinary.

When she first moved to Brighton, the flat on the Lawns had felt luxurious and it had seemed as if she was settling down, sleeping in the same bed every night, the darkness uninterrupted by any hint of emergency. It had felt as if all her difficulties were over.

Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content.

The old London was fading from her memory. She no longer expected to see the shops that had been bombed when she passed familiar streets. In many places the sites were being redeveloped. That’s what seemed real now – the new buildings and the flats above them. As she hit her stride, Mirabelle smiled. It felt good to be in the big city again and on her way.

Britain wouldn’t have won the war without its eccentric geniuses.

It’s ridiculous – a girl steps out, goes dancing, gets her hair cut, decides to spend the summer in Italy and it’s a scandal. A chap does it and no one bats an eyelid.

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 open water.

The mass communications that could enable our politics for good have instead turned it into a bland conglomeration of stinted opinion cloaked in the occasional media frenzy of blame or denial.

I'm drawn to the 1950s for lots of reasons - everything from the fashion to the increasing sense of freedom and modernity that builds throughout the decade.

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

We are living in glorious days where each readers' voice can be heard.

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

There’s nothing like a military man, even out of uniform.

If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we’d have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are involved it sometimes becomes much more problematic because they’re erratic. People do crazy things that don’t make sense.

Communism,” I observed, “is a pile of wank.

Books exist for me not as physical entities with pages and binding, but in the province of my mind.

I'm a library user and I just don't hoard books. To me, they're for sharing.

The library is a symbol of freedom.

As a historical novelist, there is very little I like more than spending time sorting through boxes of old letters, diaries, maps, trinkets, and baubles.

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

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

People are so different in wartime. No one gets to be ordinary. Not really.

I wondered if that was what I was doing myself – caring so much about something that was so long gone that I was only propping it up.

Escapers were the cream of the crop.

He finds himself bored by the shenanigans of highly spirited young men. Their concerns reside somewhere between balder and dash.

Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.

They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building?

Social and cultural history is often comprised of whatever diaries and letters remain and that is down to chance and wide open to interpretation.

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

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