Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you c...
Жил некогда в Фессалии поэт по имени Симонид. Богач Скопа пригласил его на пир прочитать хвалебную оду в свою честь. У поэтов бывают странные причуды, и Симонид включил в оду хвалы небесным близнецам...
~ You know young Francis Weston? He that waits on the king? His people are giving out that you’re a Hebrew... Next time you’re at court, take your cock out and put it on the table and see what he says...
We are not priests. We don’t want their sort of confession. We are lawyers. We want the truth little by little and only those parts of it we can use.
Body; he had a second batch of recalcitrant friars to be dispatched to Tyburn, to be slit up and gralloched by the hangman. They were traitors and deserved the death, but it is a death exceeding most...
You must, of course. Robespierre doesn’t lie or cheat or steal, doesn’t get drunk, doesn’t fornicate—overmuch. He’s not a hedonist or a mainchancer or a breaker of promises. Danton grinned. But what’s...
Wolsey sits with his elbows on his desk, his fingers dabbing his closed lids. He takes a great breath, and begins to talk: he begins to talk about England. You can’t know Albion, he says, unless you c...
Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues...
When Stephen comes into a room, the furnishings shrink from him. Chairs scuttle backwards. Joint-stools flatten themselves like pissing bitches. The woollen Bible figures in the king’s tapestries lift...
What does St. Paul mean when he says Jesus was made a little lower than the angels?
We say, how did it happen? We ask ourselves. The duke sniffs. We ask ourselves, but by the steaming blood of Christ we have no bloody answer. The steaming blood of Christ. It’s an oath worthy of Thoma...
Vere dignum et justum est, aequum et salutare.
To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king’s whims. If he wants a new wife...
The multitude, Cavendish says, is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down--for the novelty of the thing.
The multitude is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down - for the novelty of the thing.
The king takes a deep ragged breath. He's been shouting. Now – and it's a narrow thing – he decides to laugh. ‘You advocate prudence. Prudence is a virtue. But there are other virtues that belong to p...
The English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island.
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...
She held out her hands in a curve around herself, to show how emotion distends you. It makes you feel full up, a big weight in your chest, and then you don't want your dinner.