It is not so important, what happens to the body. I have led in some ways a blessed life. God has been good and not tested me. Now he does I cannot fail him. I have been vigilant over my heart, and I...
Intrigue feeds on itself; conspiracies have neither mother nor father, and yet they thrive: the only thing to know is that no one knows anything. Though
If your going to be ugly it is well to be whole-hearted about it, put some effort in. Georges turned heads.
If a man spoke to you in that tone, you'd invite him to step outside and ask someone to hold your coat.378
I don’t grudge them some bodily comforts. It cannot always be Lent. What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness—their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention. Wh...
Henry stirs into life. Do I retain you for what is easy? Jesus pity my simplicity, I have promoted you to a place in this kingdom that no one, no one of your breeding has ever held in the whole of the...
Henry says. He mimes a javelin throw: though in the restrained way
He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything they need to know.
He does not even hate Francis Weston, any more than you hate a biting midge; you just wonder why it was created.
England has enjoyed fifty years of peace. This is the Tudors’ covenant; peace is what they offer.
Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.
DANTON: Could you indeed? It's you idealists who make the best tyrants.ROBESPIERRE: It seems a bit late to be having this conversation. I've had to take up violence now, and so much else. We should ha...
Champs-de-Mars, the day of celebration: a crowd of people in Sunday clothes. Women with parasols, pet dogs on leads. Stickyfingered children pawing at their mothers; people who have bought coconuts an...
Camille said, Your trouble is, you’re backtracking. I heard you, saying the Estates would save the country. Two years ago you said nothing was possible unless we got rid of the monarchy first. Which i...
But the winter king, less occupied, will begin to think about his conscience. He will begin to think about his pride. He will begin to prepare the prizes for those who can deliver him results.
Brother Luca Pacioli. It took him thirty years to write. The book is bound in deepest green with a tooled border of gold, and its pages are edged in gilt, so that it blazes in the light. Its clasps ar...
Audley pats his arm. He wants to console him. But who can begin to do it? He si the inconsolable Master Cromwell: the unknowable, the inconstruable, the probably indefeasible Master Cromwell.
At Smithfield Frith is being shoveled up, his youth, his grace, his learning and his beauty: a compaction of mud, grease, charred bone.
Arrange your face
And your man?' He hesitates. 'Long dead too?' It is the most delicate way that can be contrived, to ask a man if he has killed someone.