England, England

An element of propaganda, of sales and marketing, always intervened between the inner and the outer person.

the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself

at least this sealed sub-baronial unit would probably be considered Sir Jack’s personal folly rather than an element in their own design statement. As long as no-one congratulated them on its ironic post-post-modernism.

Martha had already discovered that she could make almost any boy fancy her as long as she didn’t fancy him.

Had she been older, Martha might have thought the cruellest thing to do was let Jessica James and her smirking courtier continue in knees-together smugness until the day they walked up the aisle past the Crusader with his feet on the dog and into the sunset of the rest of their lives.

For ever and ever ARE MEN.

Poor Old Nelson Not Alive, Trafalgar 1805. Edward Eight Lost the Nation, 1936 Abdication.

Oxfordshire playing spoons with Buckinghamshire

Then there was Kent pointing its finger or its nose out at the Continent in warning – careful, foreigners over there

and after Cornwall or Hampshire it might be East Anglia, because Norfolk and Suffolk sat on top of one another like brother and sister