Come to that, don't pay out good money for horoscopes. If things are going to go badly for you, is that what you need to know as you saddle up?
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.
And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marshes of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried emp...
And I begin to see it. How a man may hardly know his sister, and meet her as a grown woman. She is like himself, yet not. She is familiar, yet piques his interest. One day his brotherly embrace is a l...
The year now is 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 hunter is among the most innocent of men; living in the moment makes him feel pure. When he returns in the evening, his body aches, his mind is full of pictures of leaves and sky; he does not want...
The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a ta...
Only then, Hans would insist on committing another portrait against me.
Oh, you are not disappointing, Henry says. But the moment you are, I will let you know.
Oh, by the thrice-beshitten shroud of Lazarus!
Nothing hurts, or perhaps it’s that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out.
Not a word, not a word of love, Prehaps, she thought, he does not love in the ordinary way. God loves us, after all, He manifests it in cancer, cholera, Siamese twins. Not all forms of love are compre...
It is not the stars that make us, Dr. Butts, it is circumstance and , the choices we make under pressure; our virtues make us, but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times. Or don't y...
I remembered the young man with his broad white smile and his ashen hair streaked with gold; the basted perfection of his firm flesh, and the grace of his hand clasping mine. I slotted the notes back...
I felt, he said, irritated. It seemed a waste, I suppose. To come so far. To cross the sea. To die for . . . He shrugs. God knows why.
I felt a wish to be fictionalized.
He is struck by her overview of his situation. It is as if she has understood his life. He is taken by an impulse to clasp her hand and ask her to marry him; even if they did not get on in bed, she se...
He does not know what caused him to break off from Weston and walk out. Perhaps it was when the boy said 'forty-five or fifty'. As if, past mid-life, there is a second childhood, a new phase of innoce...
God knows our hearts. There is no need for an idle formula or an intermediary. No need for language either: God is beyond translation.