John Bainbridge > Quotes

“He turned off the High Street into the court of the George Inn, one of London’s oldest. Its long galleries would have been familiar to Shakespeare, whose plays were Raikes’s one literary indulgence. He had once seen Charles Dickens supping there. Watched him in his dandy clothes being the centre of attention for near an hour. Studied him with contempt, not being able to abide the gross sentimentality of his writings. Raikes had never been able to see what all the fuss was about. The writer had seemed loud and overblown in real life. No doubt the George Inn would feature one day in another of his mawkish volumes.”
― John Bainbridge, The Shadow of William Quest

“Sergeant Berry was never enthusiastic about the countryside. It was far too empty for his liking, too quiet, too open. It needed bricks. Lots of bricks, walls of them, making houses and factories, cluttering up all those wide spaces where the sky was visible.”
― John Bainbridge, The Shadow of William Quest

“Lovat liked and detested London at the same time.”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“Wentworth, get your boys to round up everyone under suspicion. Discreetly, though. We don’t want questions asked by those old women at Westminster until we have a few answers to throw back at them.”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“These public executions are a positive disgrace.”
― John Bainbridge, The Shadow of William Quest

“Lovat thinks you can just hide someone in a place like the Commercial Road. You can’t! It might be part of one of the busiest cities on earth, but at heart the East End is just a village. Too small to hide out in.”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“Pulling down his hat he lingered on the street corner, melting back against a grimy wall of London brick.”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“Mrs Marsh looked immobile, Lovat thought, as though she never left the chair let alone the house. Better to be dead, he considered, than to live her life. He and Edwin stood in the middle of the tiny room. They had to. There were no other chairs. They had had to wait a moment or two for their eyes to get used to the dark. The window was too small and grimy to admit very much light. A pathetic fire smoked in the grate. Mrs Marsh puffed on a cigarette, knocking the ash every now and again into an ashtray on the arm of the chair. A near empty bottle of gin stood on the floor at her feet. There was no glass.”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“you know I don’t drink! The route to ruin, that’s what drink is. Haven’t drunk for near twenty years, so don’t think you can tempt me. But I’ll pour you another before I says goodnight, if you care?’ ‘And send me on the route to ruin?’ ‘There’s many a route to ruin, as it says in the Bible. We all have to find our own?”
― John Bainbridge, The Shadow of William Quest

“They could hear the little river prattling over its stony bed, as it had done since the dawn of time.”
― John Bainbridge, Dangerous Game

“Berry, supping the dregs of his tea. ‘Well, not sitting here we won’t. Tomorrow morning you and I will take the railway to Norwich. If I’m wrong, well, I’m wrong,’ said Anders, swigging the awful tea back in one go.”
― John Bainbridge, The Shadow of William Quest

“those old women at Westminster”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“he turned into Aldgate, a locality that seemed to have little to do with the machinations of constantly irritating Whitehall mandarins.”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“There are devils in hell waiting to plunge red-hot pitchforks into your guts, Sergeant Berry.’ ‘No doubt, but until I get there I’ve a job to do.”
― John Bainbridge, Deadly Quest

“Sergeant Berry took the kettle from the fire and poured hot water into the tea pot. The tea would be strong. Too strong. Berry came from the North where they seemed to like it that way.”
― John Bainbridge, The Shadow of William Quest

“Palmerston gave a wry smile. ‘You may be right, though there would scarce be a politician at Westminster who would not be equally vulnerable. It is the nature of man to be at times…unwise.”
― John Bainbridge, The Shadow of William Quest

“London life made one lazy, he considered. Unfit for real existence.”
― John Bainbridge, The Shadow of William Quest

“I’ll tell you something about that war, Billy. With great respect to all the men who died. I don’t think it was worth the fighting. Too many good men perished. For what? Is the world a better place for their sacrifice? You know what’s going on in Spain and Germany. Has anyone really learned the lessons? It was supposed to be the war to end wars. Do you see any sign of that?”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“Well, this is a deuce of a place to come,’ said Sergeant Berry, as he and Anders walked through the gates of the cemetery at Kensal Green. ‘I’m never happy in graveyards. Reminds me of how little time we have left. Why did they have to build the place so far out? We’ve been walking for hours. It’s damn near in the countryside!’ ‘And even here the long tentacles of London are stretching,’ said Anders. ‘See those houses they are building over there! The last generation would have known so much of this as farmland, but the inexorable grip of the city is closing round what were once pleasant meadows and woodlands. The place’ll spread over half England before it’s done!”
― John Bainbridge, The Shadow of William Quest

“The stink from the Thames was particularly bad on the morning air. It had been foul the night before as he wandered through the corridors of parliament. The stench seemed to cast a dreadful miasma across so much of London, and not just on warmer days.”
― John Bainbridge, Deadly Quest

“Lovat liked and detested London at the same time. He loathed the poverty that was all around and hated the smug indifference towards it from so many of the people he had to work with. He thought of Mrs Litvinov, a woman without two brass tacks to rub together, but more capacity for kindness than anyone very much in Whitehall.  Mrs Litvinov and her kind ought to run the country, he thought. And what a better country it might be.”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“the Home Secretary, Lord Palmerston, that wriggling mongoose of British politics.”
― John Bainbridge, Deadly Quest

“As the two women sobbed, Lovat felt a real hatred for the men behind this. Not just Johnson’s killers, but everyone involved in the whole bloody mess. Stinking politicians and army officers who had the world at their feet but were never satisfied. Men who couldn’t let their ambitions rest, but always wanted more.”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“Duties had kept him in London. A place he increasingly detested. A mood that may have come with age, for he had loved the city when he was young, in those last golden days of Victoria’s reign. The world had seemed so sure.”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“death, the greatest enemy, would put in an appearance today. Now that he was here he was sure of it. Death seemed to be holding so many souls in the balance of his reaping hand.”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“He looked up at the great grey peaks, some still topped by the remnants of the winter snow. He felt as close to happy as he ever got, the fittest he had been for a long time. His mind clear. Being in the mountains made him happy. He loved mountains. They were so much less trouble than people.”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“So what do you do when you’re not working?’ ‘I read books, a lot of books. I have a cottage in Twickenham, right by the river. It’s a small cottage, and the books take up a greater part of it. My wife and I are great readers.”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“After she had spoken she looked out the window once more. Darkness had fallen and she could see only her own reflection in the glass. The intruder had gone, though she had scarcely noticed him slip away. She looked at herself in the window. Soon there would be no reflection of her anywhere at all.”
― John Bainbridge, The Shadow of William Quest

“One of the finest snipers that ever graced the mud of the Western Front.”
― John Bainbridge, Balmoral Kill: A 1930s Spy Thriller

“A few, more dedicated to public service, in government, in the Cabinet even, stifling yawns as popular opinion forced them into legislating for reforms that they must have hated.”
― John Bainbridge, The Shadow of William Quest