2025-08-06 21:49:36
Secrecy was too much a habit with them both to say anything significant over a telephone line.
2025-08-07 21:53:31
Better to live an old maid with a shiny desk and a salary in the bank, proudly achieved through the sweat of her own efforts, than end up disappointed and old before her time thanks to long factory hours and too much childbirth.
2025-08-12 21:48:54
“Is that what all the girls are wearing this season?” “It’s what Osla Kendall is wearing this season.” She struck a magazine pose, refusing to regret the green satin gown in her bag. “I will not be confined within the weak lists of a country’s fashions—”
2025-08-12 21:59:51
“Are you a Hun spy?” He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know any military secrets worth seducing me for, but I hope that doesn’t put you off.”
2025-08-12 22:03:28
Osla believed everyone should fight for king and country, but she was also aware that this was a very theoretical position when you were female.
2025-08-13 21:59:49
“Me either,” said Mab, and wished she’d said “Nor I.” Osla’s polished voice and breezy slang were making her self-conscious.
2025-08-16 19:11:24
by the end of the war in Europe, Bletchley Park and its outstations had four women to every man,
2025-08-17 19:59:41
Just let one of you be nice as well as educated and gentlemanly, and I will make you the best bloody wife you ever dreamed of.
2025-08-18 10:16:42
Osla’s a nice girl, Beth thought, marshaling arguments for later.
2025-09-04 18:05:42
She had lived with an untasked brain the first twenty-four years of her life, a black-and-white film of an existence. She didn’t want a calmed, soothed mind; she wanted impossible work that her brain converted to the possible by the simple process of wringing itself inside out until the job was done.
2025-09-05 06:04:34
hate talking about myself, Miss Churt, so I assume others do too. I like silence, so I forget it makes others uncomfortable. I do apologize. When you get back from the powder room, I won’t be such a pillar of salt.
2025-09-05 06:07:42
“Why invite me out, if you didn’t expect either entertainment or romance?” She was genuinely curious. “A reminder of civilization . . .” He trailed off. “Miss Churt, I’ve seen two wars. If I can sit in a lovely restaurant, eat a good curry, look at a lovely woman—that’s a respite. A nice little illusion.”
2025-09-06 17:17:29
Beth just stared, exhausted. She was sleeping very badly—at night her brain roiled so much with five-letter groups and quartets of wheels, she was lucky if she got more than a few hours of tossing and turning. Boots
2025-09-06 21:54:23
Mab switched her torch off and Osla caught up and began pouring verbal honey. They
2025-09-07 21:45:56
“The road you are walking leads to hell,” Mrs. Finch said, white with fury. “At least you won’t be there,” said Beth.
2025-09-14 22:12:28
She ate meals Francis brought up on trays from the coy landlady, plowed through half of For Whom the Bell Tolls (next week’s Tea Party pick, since all men save her husband appeared unwilling to read Jane Eyre) when Francis left on his morning walks, made love to him when he came back, passed notes back and forth in a strange competition to see who could say the fewest words and write the most, made love again.
2025-09-17 22:41:45
“Right,” she said as if he’d answered. “The operator must have been told to send out a dummy message, the way they do after they change the wirings. Just gibberish. But he didn’t bother to make something up. He just pressed the letter L for an entire page, and the machine pushed out every other letter but L. So I had the longest, nicest crib anyone could ask for. A whole page of Ls.”
2025-09-17 22:44:54
“No, I—Christ.” Harry looked at her squarely. “You’re so bloody brilliant you take my breath away. Ever since I watched you crack Italian Enigma, I can barely breathe around you.”
2025-09-19 10:42:00
I break codes. I eat secrets. Enigma was no match for me—neither is this place.
2025-09-21 11:39:56
But her stomach rolled in sudden terror, and her mind flashed with a horrifically clear image of Lucy’s tiny body, pulled from the rubble.
2025-09-21 11:41:39
Why and if. The two most painful words in existence.
2025-09-21 12:59:00
letchley Park is infested—not by mice, but by Yanks. Pestus Americanus can be identified by its unnaturally white teeth and Camel cigarettes . . .
2025-09-21 13:00:34
because Francis would have been disappointed if she’d curled up in bed after the funerals and let the grief eat her alive.
2025-09-21 13:23:05
Verse can be handy in our line of work. I’ve broken more than one key that was picked out of a line of Goethe. Operators are supposed to choose random letters, but they don’t. It’s not in human nature to be random.”
2025-09-21 15:04:36
Those like herself who had lost husbands, fiancés, boyfriends, were so raw in their own grief that Mab avoided them,
2025-09-21 15:11:59
You have to live with someone to know them. I’ve lived with my billet-mates for three and a half years; I know them inside and out. I loved Francis Gray, and to me he was perfect, and that’s proof I didn’t know him very well at all.
2025-09-21 15:12:36
never got to realize all the ways he wasn’t perfect. I didn’t get to reach the point where the song he whistled while shaving drove me mad or learn how rainy days made him short tempered. He never got to realize that I’m not some great wartime love, just a shallow cow who lives for pretty shoes and library novels. We never got to quarrel over the milk bill or whether to buy strawberry jam or marmalade
2025-09-21 17:20:17
“Our brains work a certain way—a way that makes us useful. And yes, we save lives. But it is colossally goddamned arrogant to look down on those lives we save because their brains don’t work like ours.”
2025-09-26 22:56:47
Like most men, the driver went completely to pieces when confronted with a woman’s private functions.
2025-09-27 01:14:21
Beth wondered if he was relieved, finally, to have an audience for all these carefully marshaled arguments.
2025-09-28 00:03:47
“What are the three fastest means of communication?” Osla quoted the old joke, then she and Mab chanted the answer together: “Telegraph, telephone, tell a woman!”
2025-09-28 23:05:17
“I’m very sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Knox, but it’s an emergency. Three and a half years ago, I locked something in your husband’s safe. I’ve come to retrieve it.”
2025-09-29 21:02:06
She’d learned something these last few days about dealing with cryptanalysts: point them at the coffee, point them at the problem, then get out of the way.
2025-09-29 23:10:45
don’t need thanks.” Mab took a last drag on her cigarette. “Duty, honor, oaths—they are not just for soldiers. Not just for men.
2025-09-29 23:12:27
ve been reading the Principia Mathematica.” She found Isaac Newton flat going, but sometimes she caught a glimpse of intriguing spirals round the edges of the complicated exercises Harry showed her. Spirals of numbers rather than letters.