But you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and they thought that Achil...
But remember this above all: defeat your instinct. Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest,...
But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done, that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they're mine.
But chivalry’s day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings ar...
But Christendom was overturned for the Boleyn marriage, to put the ginger pig in the cradle;
Anne's lovers are phantom gentlemen, flitting by night with adulterous intent. They come and go by night, unchallenged. They skim over the river like midges, flicker against the dark, their doublets s...
Anne says, It is all about me.
Anne climbing the marble steps to Heaven, her good deeds like jewels weighting wrists and neck.
And indeed, who can doubt that everything would be different and better, if only England were ruled by village idiots and their drunken friends?
And Louis is weak. Let him give an inch, and some Cromwell will appear.
And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and w...
Already d'Anton did not believe this. He recognized it as a disclaimer that Camille would issue from time to time in the hope of disguising the fact that he was an inveterate hell-raiser.
A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.
A printing press that can write its own books? A mind that thinks about itself? If I don’t have it, at least the King of France doesn’t either.
A phrase runs through his head – was it Thomas More’s? – ‘the peace of the hen coop when the fox has run home’. He sees the scattered carcasses,
A generation back, his family were called Writh, but they thought an elegant extension would give them consequence;Cromwell of Wriothesley
A decade of self-aggrandisement, since his daughter flashed her cunny at the king, has made Boleyn rich and settled and confident.
This is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.
He holds the boy, feeling the jump of his pulses, his stiff sinews, the ropes of his muscles, and makes sounds of comfort, as he did to his children when they were small, or as he does to a spaniel wh...
. .She turns her head away, but through the thin film of her veil he can see her skin glow. Because women will coax: tell me, just tell me something, tell me your thoughts; and this he has done.