Sara Sheridan

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument.

The question shouldn't be, 'Are we guilty about our Colonial past?' it should be, 'Why aren't we more guilty about our corporate present?

Mirabelle always ate her lunch on Brighton beach if the weather was in any way passable, but out of sheer principle she never paid tuppence for a chair. We did not win the war to have to pay to sit down, she frequently found herself thinking.

Lately Mirabelle had reflected wistfully if people even noticed her _ a smartly dressed woman who came and went along the Promenade, always alone.

My father could talk about the Romany way of life and its culture. He could talk about freedom and the Scottish spirit. But that was all he could talk about. I was desperate for someone to talk to but there was just nobody there.

For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.

We might give her presents, tell some tales, but would she ever be able to really understand what the journey had been like for us?

It seemed to me that these months of watching and listening, second-guessing words and phrases, seeking so much that was new, had somehow changed me.

Her eyes betrayed no shock at the sights of the quay as they unfolded _ not the sweating deckhands, the prostitutes crowding the ship, the hubbub of stalls, including one where three slaves were for sale, their ankles manacled. She might as well have been walking through a country garden as she moved inexorably away from the water.

A journey is an achievement, Maria, just as much as a mathematical proof.

The moon was low but not full. The men set out along the dock in conversation. As they dropped onto the dark beach, Simmons declared, __here can be no better place in the world than this.__enderson had to agree. The beach was beautiful. The stars lit the sand and balmy air rode in as the waves washed up on paradise

It was as if she was a dream, like London, which he could not entirely grasp and of which he was not worthy. He wanted to be part of it but had forgotten how. It seemed extraordinary and strange that this paragon among women had condescended to travel on his ship. In fact, she__ insisted upon it. Her presence was at once otherworldly and familiar, none of which explained why his brain ceased to function when he was in her company.

The smell of roasting meat rose from the street stalls in a sizzle and a fiddle player begged for coin as he rasped a haunting melody. Life could not be more perfect.

It had occurred to her many times that on board it didn__ matter where you were coming from or where you were heading. Each voyage had its own charisma. Like writing a book _ word by word _ or crossing a country _ step by step _ each minute had to be lived moment by moment.

The daily chocolate left Will in high spirits, so that some days he believed he could wheel with the gulls that fished the foaming water close to shore. Now that he felt so free, it came to him that the corner of England, which up till now had been his whole universe, was in fact only a scrap of a boundless realm.

She enjoyed the sights and sounds of the dockside _ ports were places of freedom.

The jungle is alive. It__ dangerous as a living nightmare and brimful of hostility.