"Daughter of Time"

[fiefoe]

I'd quite forgotten what Josephine Tey's book was about by the time I picked it up in the library, and the elegant volume turned out to be quite a treat. The movie length book recalls "Rear Window", where the chief investigator was laid up and also had to endure the attention of eccentric nurses.

• In hospitals there was no time off for good behavior.
• The stars merely reduce one to the status of an amoeba.. But a snow mountain is a nice human-size yardstick.
• On Richard the Lionheart: A hyperthyroid type, rocketing to and fro about the earth like a badly made firework.
• 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.
• Truth isn't in accounts but in account books.
• "If Morton was the carrier (of the rumor), then there had to be another outbreak on the Continent, when he moved on there."
• "He was the illegitimate only son of a King. Henry (VII) was the great-grandson of an illegitimate son of a younger son of a King."
• This effervescence that you observe in me is intellectual carbonisation. Spiritual Rejoicing, An entirely cerebral scintillation."
• ".. how we stuck to things that actually happened and not what someone reported afterward about it, and how we looked for the break in the normal pattern that would indicate where the mischief was, like bubbles coming up from a diver way below." {The research process surely went smoothly.}