This was the usual thing. What I asked for was facts: what I got was a sermon.
This revolution - will it be a living?''We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I'm visiting a client. He's going to be hanged tomorrow.''Is that usual?''Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property...
They hurry in; the wind bangs a door behind them. Rafe takes his arm. He says, this silence of More's, it was never really silence, was it? It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as far as qui...
They claim they're living the vita apostolica; but you didn't find the apostles feeling each other's bollocks.
They always say, we’ll just do another year. It’s called the golden handcuffs.
These are good days for him: every day a fight he can win. Still serving your Hebrew God, I see, remarks Sir Thomas More. I mean, your idol Usury. But when More, a scholar revered through Europe, wake...
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.
The world beyond the glass is the world of masculine action. Everything she sees is what a man has built. But at each turn-off, each junction, women are waiting to know their fate.
The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.
The living result of the queen’s labors is the diminutive Mary—not really a whole princess, perhaps two-thirds of one.
Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.
Some debts should never be tallied, he says. I myself, I know what is owed me, but by God I know what I owe.
So, Lucile thinks, Gabrielle has the prospect of escape; but in her apartment at the rue des Cordeliers, she sits still and silent, in the conscious postures of pregnant women. Sometimes she cries; th...
Messengers wait outside the door, to carry urgent orders for release. It is difficult, when the pen skips over a name, to associate it with the corpse it might belong to, tomorrow or the day after tha...
Men like Carew, he knows, tend to blame him, Cromwell, for Anne’s rise in the world; he facilitated it, he broke the old marriage and let in the new. He does not expect them to soften to him, to inclu...
Masters, it is good pastime to have a wife. When they have listened
It is St. Catherine’s Day: in honor of the saint who was threatened with martyrdom on a wheel, we all walk in circles to our destination. At least, that’s the theory. He has never seen anyone over the...
Gradually, you see, our people are coming into the power they have always thought is their due.
Erasmus says that you should praise a ruler even for qualities he does not have. For the flattery gives him to think. And the qualities he presently lacks, he might go to work on them.