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

by Josephine Tey

He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents.

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.

He was so disgusted that he flung the precious book on to the floor before he remembered that it was the property of a Public Library and his only by grace and for fourteen days.

Isn’t it odd how we never think of victims as anything but white innocents. Like Joseph in the Bible. I’m sure he was a quite intolerable young man, actually, and long overdue for that pushing into the pit.

“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.”

Truth isn’t in accounts but in account books.”

Tomorrow he was going home. Going home to be cosseted by Mrs. Tinker. He would have to spend half of each day in bed and he would be able to walk only with the aid of sticks, but he would be his own man again. At the bidding of no one. In tutelage to no half-pint piece of efficiency, yearned over by no lump of outsized benevolence. It was a glorious prospect.