Quotes from Adam Sisman

We all reinvent our pasts, but writers are in a class of their own

She had typed A Murder of Quality under protest, but this time she declined, so David had to rely on the Embassy secretaries instead. In a letter to Ann written in June, he complained that 'the new book drags along but the girls are all away and there's no one to type it'.35

I cannot get used to the dispassion with which wealthy Greeks contemplate their impoverished compatriots;

In 1989 an American invasion, Operation Just Cause, had ousted the government of President Manuel Noriega. 'They got rid of Ali Baba but they forgot the forty thieves,' ran a popular joke in Panama.

In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer.

His standards for himself, and for everybody around him, are the highest. He was Foreign Office trained and wants the world to function at that level. He is meticulous about everything; he hates to be late; he hates inaccuracy; he double checks everything; he follows up everything; he has fallbacks if things should, in spite of everybody's efforts, go wrong.7