Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you wa...
Beneath every history, another history.
Because Islam doesn’t, he said, his voice toneless,
At least, he thinks, the fellow has the wit to see what this is about: not one year's grudge or two, but a fat extract from the book of grief, kept since the cardinal came down. He says, 'Life pays yo...
Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals.
ALL JUNE, disasters in the Vendée. At different times the rebels have Angers, Saumur, Chinon; are narrowly defeated in the battle for Nantes, where off the coast the British navy waits to support them...
A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which t...
«Maximilien, cerca di imparare questa verità», disse padre Herivaux, «gli uomini per la maggior parte sono pigri e ti valuteranno secondo la considerazione che tu hai di te stesso. Assicurati dunque c...
In case the dead ones rolled in late.
You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – b...
When he was at the Vatican, in Cardinal Bainbridge’s day, he quickly saw that no one in the papal court grasped what was happening, ever; and least of all the Pope. Intrigue feeds on itself; conspirac...
What for do we nail down the dead?
Truth isn’t pretty, I thought, and the pursuit of it doesn’t make pretty people. Truth isn’t elegant; that’s just mathematicians’ sentimentality. Truth is squalid and full of blots, and you can only f...
Thomas Cromwell is now about fifty years old. He has a labourer's body, stocky, useful, running to fat. He has black hair, greying now, and because of his impermeable skin, which seems designed to res...
There is no obvious reason for voices and visions. My temperature is near normal and my pain relief is the usual moderate regime. Later the hallies, as I think of them, become less threatening, but mo...
The year is now 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light o...
The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.
The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one'...
The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.
The Republic is six months old, and it’s flying apart. It has no cohesive force—only a monarchy has that. Surely you can see? We need the monarchy to pull the country together— then we can win the war...