Escapers were the cream of the crop.

Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.

Mirabelle always ate her lunch on Brighton beach if the weather was in any way passable, but out of sheer principle she never paid tuppence for a chair. We did not win the war to have to pay to sit down, she frequently found herself thinking.

Britain wouldn’t have won the war without its eccentric geniuses.

It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on one’s judgement.

Everyone was important during the war. Everyone. We worked together and we won.

During the war some of the country’s sharpest minds had looked as if they had been dragged through a hedge backwards.

It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.

Didn’t young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?