Adam Sisman Quotes & Sayings

In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer. — Adam Sisman

She had typed A Murder of Quality under protest, but this time she declined, so David had to rely on the Embassy secretaries instead. In a letter to Ann written in June, he complained that 'the new book drags along but the girls are all away and there's no one to type it'.35 — Adam Sisman

I cannot get used to the dispassion with which wealthy Greeks contemplate their impoverished compatriots; — Adam Sisman

In 1989 an American invasion, Operation Just Cause, had ousted the government of President Manuel Noriega. 'They got rid of Ali Baba but they forgot the forty thieves,' ran a popular joke in Panama. — Adam Sisman

For five years the refugees of Eastern Europe had been pouring into Austria through every fast-closing gap in the barbed wire: crashing frontiers in stolen cars and lorries, across minefields, clinging to the underneath of trains, to be corralled and questioned and decided over in their thousands, while they played chess on wooden packing cases and showed each other photographs of people they would never see again. They came from Hungary and Romania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and sometimes Russia, and they hoped they were on their way to Canada and Australia and Palestine. They had travelled by devious routes and often for devious reasons. They were doctors and scientists and bricklayers. They were truck drivers, thieves, acrobats, publishers, rapists and architects. — Adam Sisman