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:
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...
The Revolution has got frozen up. They have frozen it up with their talk of moderation. To stand still in Revolution is to slip backwards.
Suppose she denied him then but favored him some other time? Women are weak and easily conquered by flattery. Especially when men write verses to them, and there are some who sat that Wyatt writes bet...
Suppose he found that persistent unsparing voice at his elbow one day, claiming that Danton lacked probity; he had an answer, pat, not a logical one, but one sufficiently chilling to put logic in abey...
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...
She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey.
Rumours crop in the short summer nights. Dawn finds them like mushroomsin the damp grass. Members of Thomas Cromwell's household have been seeking a midwife in the small hours of the morning. He is hi...
Reculer pour mieux sauter.
Rafe and Richard say that when my education is sufficient you mean to marry me to some old dowager with a great settlement and black teeth, and she will wear me out with lechery and rule me with her w...
People confuse early rising with moral worth;
Only then, Hans would insist on committing another portrait against me.
One of the French lords says, To lose gracefully is an art that every gentleman cultivates. I hope to cultivate it too, he says. If you see an example I might follow, please point it out.
One never anticipated the scale of it, Brissot whispered. It was planned, yes, and people were paid—but not ten thousand people. Not even the Duke could pay ten thousand people. They acted for themsel...
Now here is Gardiner, patting a manuscript as if it were the cheek of a plump baby: ‘The king will be pleased to read this. I have called it, Of True Obedience.’ ‘You had better let me see it before i...
Nothing hurts, or perhaps it’s that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out.
Illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false. Then all our defences are kn...
I see that both the living and the dead commute, riding their familiar trains. I am not, as you will have gathered, a person who needs false excitement, or simulated innovation. I am willing, though,...
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 a wish to be fictionalized.