I've always liked lost, old New York.

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.

He was, in military life, a sergeant. Casson had already guessed that by the time he got around to mentioning it. A sergeant: good at getting things done. By the book so long as it worked. By being crooked if that’s what it took.

I don’t inflict horrors on readers.

When you are done living for yourself, only then do you learn that living for others is the privilege,’ Renata.

I don’t just want my books to be about the ’30s and ’40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as ’40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

You can’t make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.

But the world doesn’t run on logic, it runs on the seven deadly sins and the weather. – Alan Furst; Red Gold.

I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I’m a genre writer.