“She'll never ride," Eleanor said. She can't even bump the saddle yet.""Perhaps loony people can't ride," Ruth suggested."Ruth," Bee said, with vigour. "The pupils at the Manor are not lunatic. They are not even mentally deficient. They are just 'difficult.'""Ill-adjusted is the technical description," Simon said."Well, they behave like lunatics. If you behave like a lunatic how is anyone to tell that you're not one?”

“Ruth puts in all the tiddley bits and the expression and doesn’t mind how many wrong notes she strikes, but with Jane it is accuracy or nothing. I don’t know which Chopin would have hated more,” Eleanor said, folding bread and butter into a thickness that would match her appetite.”

“Most people's first books are their best anyways. It's the one they wanted most to write.”

“That is why historians surprise me. They seem to have no talent for the likeliness of any situation. They see history like a peepshow; with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.”

“It's an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don't want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed.Very odd, isn't it.”

“One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.”

“How old was More when Richard succeeded?He was five.When that dramatic council scene had taken place at the Tower, Thomas More had been five years old. He had been only eight when Richard died at Bosworth.Everything in that history had been hearsay.”