Appurtenances,
Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little a...
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 relentless bonhomie of yours, I knew it would wear out in the end. It is a coin that has changed hands so often. And now the small silver is worn out and we see the base metal.
This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the l...
They say that at Thomas More’s trial, Master Secretary here followed the jury to their deliberations, and when they were seated he closed the door behind him and he laid down the law. Let me put you o...
These are days of brutal truth from Tyndale. Saints are not your friends and they will not protect you. They cannot help you to salvation. You cannot engage them to your service with prayers and candl...
There is no need for unanimity, Saint- Just said. It would have been desirable, but let’s get on. There are only two signatures wanting, I think, besides those who have refused. Citizen Lacoste, you n...
There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented or new things that pretend to be old.
There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins.
There are codes so subtle that they change their whole meaning in half a line, or in a syllable, or in a pause, a caesura.
The wine is one of those big, noble wines that Brandon favours, and Chapuys drinks appreciatively and says I don't understand it, nothing do I understand in this benighted country. Is Cranmer Pope now...
The living result of the queen’s labors is the diminutive Mary—not really a whole princess, perhaps two-thirds of one.
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...
Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.
Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
Our virtues make us; but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times.
Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn’t see how it w...
In these matters, the cardinal says, there is no measure of time; these spirits slip from our hands and through the ages, serpentine, mutable, sly.
In his student days he was known for a sharp slanderous tongue, for irreverance to his seniors, for drinking and gaming for high stakes. But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we...