“When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios.”

“It was a little skirmish across a century.”

“I believe that an author who cannot control her characters is, like a mother who cannot control her children, not really fit to look after them.”

“A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.”

“Albert Campion: 'I’m serious!'Lugg: 'That’s unhealthy in itself.”

“The process of elimination, combined with a modicum of common sense, will always assist us to arrive at the correct conclusion with the maximum of possible accuracy and the minimum of hard labor. Which being translated means: I guessed it.”

“There are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder.”