The Daughter of Time (Inspector Alan Grant, #5)

by Josephine Tey

He said afterwards that he had no recollection of anything that happened between his entrance and the point where he came to and found himself half-way through the act.” “A black-out, you mean?” “No. Oh, no. Just being an automaton.

It was shocking how little history remained with one after a good education.

The sorrows of humanity are no one’s sorrows, as newspaper readers long ago found out.

A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.

but perhaps a series of small satisfactions scattered like sequins over the texture of everyday life was of greater worth than the academic satisfaction of owning a collection of fine objects at the back of a drawer.

It was Grant’s belief that if you could not find out about a man, the next best way to arrive at an estimate of him was to find out about his mother.

He, Alan Grant, had known Great Minds so uncritical that they would believe a story that would make a con man blush for shame.

“Give me research. After all, the truth of anything at all doesn’t lie in someone’s account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper. The sale of a house. The price of a ring.”

No one can say that a man is incapable of murder—after long years on the Embankment Grant knew that only too well—but one can be sure to within one degree of the absolute when a man is incapable of silliness.