My father was a soldier and my mother was a great mover. She once counted up how many places she had lived in during the first 25 years of her marriage and it came to 20.

They may turn out to be a great disappointment, or perhaps they may be full of enchanting surprises.

I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.

A lot of people stop short. They don't actually die but they say, 'Right I'm old, and I'm going to retire,' and then they dwindle into nothing. They go off to Florida and become jolly boring.

It seemed sensible to move to a market town where I could walk everywhere.

People try much less hard to make a marriage work than they used to fifty years ago. Divorce is easier.

Each marriage has to be judged separately, and we never know what's going on in another person's marriage.