I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters.

Take a newspaper account of Waterloo or Trafalgar, with all the small advertisements: it seems much more real than reading about it in a history book.

People can lie in letters, but they tend not to. They certainly lie in memoirs.

She has always been perfectly shameless about reading letters not meant for her, and, as she said, she was ideally suited for the work by never having much inclination to answer letters back.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

One of the pleasures of reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer