“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.”

“The library is a symbol of freedom.”

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

“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!.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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