Her aunt and uncle worked fifteen hours a day in their desperate attempt to keep the corner shop in profit, and their Sundays were marked by exhaustion. The moral code by which they lived was that of cleanliness, respectability and prudence. Religion...
What mattered at fifty-eight was what had mattered at eighteen: breeding and good bone structure.
All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.
I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No...
Every island to a child is a treasure island.
Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt; it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified.
Our parents' generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best.
Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.
Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.
All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but with Jane Austen, what we have is M...
With the death of what described as rational religon and the proponents of what remains sending out such confusing and uncertain messages, all civilised people have to be ethicists. We must work out our own salvation with diligence based on what we b...
Benton had a strong interest in helping to ensure that Warren's home life wasn't greatly disturbed: his wife was Cornish, and that morning Warren had arrived with six Cornish pasties of remarkable flavour and succulence.
Snapping shut his mobile, Dalgliesh reflected that murder, a unique crime for which no reparation is ever possible, imposes it own compulsions as well as it's conventions. He doubted whether Macklefield [the murder victim's Will attorney] would have ...
(A murderer about their victim:) "He was an expert in vicarious death. I should like to have been there to see how he enjoyed the real thing.
There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.
What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted. "Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that...
The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves' eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world's terrors.
Beauty is intellectually confusing; it sabotages common sense.
You won't get love from a child if you don't give love.
What is there to be frightened of? We shall be dealing only with men.
She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love.
