Beauty was where you found it, and it was always comforting to see.

They hadn’t lived long enough to understand what grace it was to die in an instant and not to linger.

Most people – however much they might deny it – had an idea of what they were getting into when they got into it.

Pucetti’s was the generation that was all in favour of sentiment, sharing other people’s pain, voicing compassion for the downtrodden, yet Brunetti often found in them traces of a ruthlessness that chilled his spirit and made him fearful for the future. He wondered if the cheap sentimentality of television and film had sent them into some sort of emotional insulin shock and suffocated their ability to feel empathy with the unappealing victims of the mess that real life created.

My father read ‘The New York Times,’ my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.

He hesitated then, anticipating the panic that came when there was nothing left to read.

He dealt every day with people who believed they weren’t happy and who further believed that by committing some crime – theft, murder, deceit, blackmail, even kidnapping – they would find the magic elixir that would transform the perceived misery of their lives into that most desired of states: happiness.

I think people prefer to remember happy times, well, happier times, and if they can’t remember them, then to change the memories and make them happier.

Women don’t use knives,’ Griffoni answered, reciting it as though she were Euclid listing another axiom. Although he agreed with her, Brunetti was curious about the basis for her belief. ‘You offering proof of that?’ ‘Kitchens,’ she said laconically. ‘Kitchens?’ ‘The knives are kept in the kitchen, and their husbands pass through there every day, countless times, yet very few of them get stabbed. That’s because women don’t use knives, and they don’t stab people.

How beautiful, the grace of women; how soft their charity.