Quotes from Rennie Airth

Generally speaking, psychiatry is concerned with the treatment of neuroses, with patients who are aware of their illness and wish to be cured. Dr. Franz Weiss

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned   W. B. Yeats 'The Second Coming

when he had still thought his experiences might have some value – that his life might amount to something – and which were gathering dust in a desk drawer.

The route had been renamed after the war, Sergeant Booth had told them in the taxi. Now it was known as the Road of Remembrance. To Billy, recalling Alf Dawkins with his crutches and his nervous tick, begging for half-crowns, it seemed more a case of how quickly people forgot.

Everything's changing now. It's all patrol cars and fewer feet on the beat. I hope they know what they're doing.

In spite of his policeman's conditioning, he clung to the belief he'd grown up with: that people, by and large, behaved according to how they were treated.

His specific brief was to cultivate contacts in the Nazi party. It's something we've been slow to get on to. Like others, we've tended to dismiss them as rabble. Now it looks as though they may form part of the next government. Or, God forbid, end up running it.

Increasingly solitary, he saw his life as all that was left to him: a tattered sail that might bear the wind but would bring him to no haven.