All colors of people mingle in the souks and squares. But they do not merge.
Which of these Thomases saw the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves right through you.
When no one else could see, he could see: and that is what it means to be a king.
This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.
This visit has compacted the court's quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town's walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguo...
They say she has all the gentlemen of the king’s privy chamber, one after another. She don’t like delay so they all stand in a line frigging their members, till she shouts, Next.
There are some strange cold people in this world. It is priests, I think...Training themselves out of natural feeling. They mean it for the best, of course.
The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.
The Robespierre women (as one tended to think of them now) were all on display. Madame looked actively, rather intimidatingly benevolent; it was her aim in life to find a Jacobin who was hungry, then...
Some would think that it ought to come in the course of nature to a woman of thirty-six, a wife and mother. A little calm, a little quiet within - little chance. Even after childbearing, there is bloo...
So often in council he has taken Katherine’s part, as if he were one of her appointed lawyers. ‘You make this argument, my lords,’ he has said, ‘but the dowager princess will allege…’ And ‘Katherine w...
Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a...
In this new hall the factions regroup in their old places. Legendre the butcher bawls out a Brissotin: I’ll slaughter you! First, says the deputy, have a decree passed to say that I am an ox.
I think back to those days after the Bastille fell, the Mercure Nationale run from the back of the shop, that little Louise sticking her well-bred nose in the air and flouncing off to bawl out their p...
He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. 'Of course there will be a revolution,' he said. 'You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope....
He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he's pleasuring himself.
Give me time, she said mockingly. That’s the anthem of the married man. Give me time while I make my excuses, give me time while I sort out my head. Just another week, just another decade, just till m...
For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don'...
Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.